


collect/select

by sakuraba



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Alternate Universe, Friendship, M/M, Pining, sometimes it's kiss a ghost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-05-25 21:23:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14985863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakuraba/pseuds/sakuraba
Summary: Hinata wakes up dead in Shibuya. It's not the most exciting thing to happen to him that week.(Or: the The World Ends With You inspired AU that Kodaka has been dangling overhead since the dawn of time.)





	collect/select

**Author's Note:**

  * For [guttersvoice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/guttersvoice/gifts).



> a (ridiculously late) birthday gift to the love of my life and also the most self-indulgent thing i've ever written!! a ship we both adore written in the place of... a ship we both adore. this ended up as much more of a fun love letter to both series than anything resembling Fine Literature TM, so here's hoping it's as fun to read as it was to write!
> 
> this simultaneously really ran away with me _and_ isn't nearly as long as it could've been, but hey! what can you do.

Hinata wakes up dead.

It’s not even the worst day in recent memory, all things considered. The scramble is lit up like a boardwalk on the water even in broad daylight, electric and bright against an ocean of dark concrete. The end of civilization, apparently, has got nothing on Shibuya, because everything is up and sprawling like despair had never laid a finely-manicured finger on it all those years ago, people laughing and gossiping and lost in thought as they mill through the streets like ants. Many of them bodily passing through him, in fact. But hey, a guy’s gotta appreciate some privacy.

And – oh, yeah, this isn’t the first time this has happened.

He’s surveying the crowds with a keen eye when he spots him – or rather,  _is spotted by._ A pale shadow, something like a trick of the light, white and mirage-shimmering like morning sun on a sharp slice of lake. Next to Hachiko, like Hinata himself had been. Pale beneath the bronze; maybe he’ll be loyal.

He wades through the currents of strangers only to be interrupted before he has a chance to say anything. Typical, really, he thinks sourly. Wouldn’t be an effective enough metaphor if he wasn’t also  _figuratively_  invisible.

Mr. Stranger bows a little, just deep enough that Hinata is left to wonder if he’s being sarcastic, and says, “I should introduce myself!” like they’ve already struck up conversation.

Mr. Stranger proceeds to explain that his name is Komaeda Nagito, and that he is (“oh, was, haha!”) a student, and that while it’s a “completely unremarkable and not at all worth mentioning, really,” he’s gifted with luck. When Hinata blinks at this – because who mentions their good luck as part of their three-for-one icebreaker deal,  _really;_ they’re dead, not seeking arrangement – Komaeda sighs, seeming more put-upon by his general existence than by Hinata’s confusion.

“I don’t blame you for being confused,” he says, fiddling with the sleeves of his jacket forlornly. It hangs off him like a funeral shroud. “It’s pretty abysmal as far as talents go, isn't it? Still, I suppose it got me here, so it must be worth  _something…_ ” He laughs, scratching the back of his head sheepishly. Inoffensive in a way that could probably be called trying too hard if he didn't seem so... genuinely harmless. “And you…?”

Oh, yeah. This again. Hinata steels himself, the corner of his mouth pulling puckered in some kind of stress-line. Being dead is really going to age him, he thinks. “Er – I don’t… remember?" he says. "Like. At all, actually.”

Komaeda fairly blanches. “You don’t remember who you are?”

“Wh– oh! No, of course I– I’m Hinata. Hajime.” Real smooth. Amazing what being dead can do to your conversational skills. “I just mean I don’t. Remember my talent.”

“Oh! Well that’s…” A spell of puzzlement unravels on his face, a drop of ink bleeding into a cloud in water. Which, yeah, go figure. Pretty big thing to forget, he's been told. “How unusual! Oh, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Hinata-kun. Getting into the Reaper’s Game means you must have a talent truly capable of inspiring hope in others – otherwise you wouldn’t be given a chance to come back to life like this!”

He takes Hinata’s hand in both of his and squeezes lightly, smiling like there’s some holy light in Hinata they’ve yet to uncover. Hinata startles and jerks it away, but the feeling of being worth looking at lingers. All of his awareness settles into that warmth in his hand like snow to the bottom of a globe.

Distracting. He looks up with a grimace – to the looming jumbotrons lit up with expiration dates for the already-dead, then down to timer projected from god-knows-where onto his palm in clinical, flickering red.  _7 Days._ “Hope, huh.”

* * *

 

 Contrary to what his first-year Halloween costume and second-year social life might have led you to believe, Hinata hasn’t always been a ghost. This is, in fact, only his eighth day kicking it in the realm of the dead, and he’s adjusting pretty damn well, if he does say so himself.

…maybe not such a good sign.

It started like this, more or less:

He woke up incorporeal in the heart of Shibuya, people passing through him like an overwrought teen drama. He met some other ghosts. He did them some favors on threat of becoming a much more permanent ghost, with the help of some ghosts in the same situation he was in. This was apparently a game. He apparently won.

Things apparently did not go as planned.

 “That’s all you’re going to say?” Komaeda says, falling into step with him despite Hinata’s most valiant efforts. Komaeda seems like a chill guy and all, and he's -- uh, yeah, kind of pretty, but Hinata  _really_ needs to win, like. For real this time. Not just for himself, but for-–

“Look, it’s nothing personal,” he explains. He hopes Komaeda can’t see him wince. Being dead is one thing, but being an asshole to someone so earnest doesn’t exactly make him feel great about his personhood or whatever. “It’s just-– I have something really important riding on this, you know? And, er, I really need a partner who’s good in a fight…”

Komaeda stops suddenly, like Hinata’s put a brick wall right in front of him. Well, obviously; the intent to win and win without someone is essentially the intent to get them killed off for real. The urge to chastise himself for being so blunt and the urge to chastise himself for being such a pussy about it make a double-helix out of his guts, and he turns around to survey the damage.

Komaeda’s eyes, sea-green and dark, are fairly  _glittering,_ his hands clasped together like he’s praying. “Hinata-kun,” he says, almost  _reverent,_ and okay, screw holding himself accountable, this is a little weird. “I had no idea your will to win was so strong! If you want to live so badly that you’re willing to turn away an unworthy partner, knowing there’s a chance you might not find another in time… You must really want to win! And you’re right, of course – it’d be really presumptuous for a guy like me to think you’d be okay partnering with someone so obviously below your skill level, haha!”

And Hinata – winces, caught up again between his own indecision, whether it'd be more appropriate to reassure or admonish. He gets the feeling this is going to become a running theme with Komaeda, partners or no, and fast: getting twisted and tangled along the lines of his own reactions. It certainly has been so far.

Fortunately, the possibility isn’t a confrontation he has to have right now, if ever; a familiar  _sproing_ ing sound signals an oncoming rush of Monokumas through the street, and Hinata barely has time to turn before he sees them. A bunch of black-and-white teddy bear plushes hellbent on getting them, like, permadead, and fast. Hinata grimaces as he reaches for the toy gun at his side. Fuckin’ gaudy.

It isn’t until the fight is over that he realizes the pact has formed – of course. It’s impossible to fight in the Reaper’s Game without a partner. There’s only one possibility, really, and so he turns with the corners of his mouth still fixed downward to scold Komaeda for going against his wishes (his apparently  _noble_ and  _admirable_ wishes, and seriously what was up with that), only to stop short.

Komaeda’s eyes are dark and bright, nearly spiraling in the mid-day sun;the nervousness that clung to him only a minute before has melted away, and replacing it now instead is a sort of idle grace, a focus that seems to stop time, if only for a fraction of a second. More a lag than anything, like light refracting in water. He’s holding a gun.

The weapons players get to stop Monokumas are ridiculous and varied; he’s only been here a week, but already he’s seen plenty of nonsense, a megaphone and enhanced gloves and scissors and even  _banknotes_ just being a few of them. Hell, Hinata’s is just a little toy gun that shoots bullets shaped like kanji. (It feels about as ridiculous in his hands as he imagines as it would look shooting down teddy bears in Shibuya, if anyone else could actually see him.) But Komaeda’s gun looks  _real,_ like he’d smuggled it from overseas or something rather than woken up with it in his hands and been told to play target practice with the demonic Toys R Us section.

For a second, Hinata’s pulse jumps into his throat.

Surprise must have frozen his annoyance onto his face rather than erasing it, however, because when Komaeda glances over his shoulder and sees him looking he startles, scratching the back of his head sheepishly like he had before. “Sorry, Hinata-kun!” he says. “The pact formed automatically when I started fighting with you. I’m sure you would’ve been more than capable of fighting them off on your own, but I just couldn’t help myself!”

Like fighting alone is even possible here. Hinata blinks the glare out of his eyes; it must’ve been from the gun. “Whatever,” he says, and rakes a hand through his hair. There’s too much going on right now -- getting paranoid about his partner is the last thing he needs to be doing to himself. “Let’s just focus on today’s mission – we just have to get to 104, right?”

Komaeda beams. “Right!”

He gets the feeling this is going to be a long week.

* * *

 

Her name was Nanami.

Well, her name still  _is_ Nanami, but-– look, it’s more of a narrative momentum thing. When they met eight days ago, she introduced herself (absently) as Nanami Chiaki. Hinata didn’t introduce himself at all, on account of he was very upset about being dead.

“I died in a car accident,” she said, because she was sleepy and blunt and didn’t care much about Hinata’s death-distress. At present, he was banging on the invisible wall that seemed to be keeping them locked up in Shibuya. Hinata considered (still considers, really, even after all this) himself a pretty level-headed kind of guy, but being trapped unlocks a sort of animal instinct in people; he liked Shibuya, and there certainly worse places to be holed up, like school or a desert island, but if he didn’t get out or wake up at home in approximately the next five minutes he was going to go pretty much absolutely apeshit.

“We’re not dead,” he insisted for what seemed to be the hundredth time, and really, what about that was so hard to understand? He was right here, talking and yelling and… hitting like any other living, breathing high school boy. Just because people were walking bodily through him, and not listening to him when he talked, and–

”Hm…” Nanami’s head fell to the side. “You don’t remember?”

“I’m not–”

“Okay. What’s your talent, then?”

This, despite everything, found a way to strike a nerve. Dead kids still had a functioning nervous system then, haha. (He wasn’t dead.) “…What?”

“Your talent,” she said again, shifting balance to her other foot. It was the most movement he’d seen from her yet. “Only people with extraordinary talent get to be in the Reaper’s Game. Like, for me it's video games. I don’t… really see why it makes a difference? But that’s how it works, I think.”

Talent, huh.

“I don’t… remember,” he said, slowly. But he didn’t remember dying, either, so maybe–-

Not that he was dead.

Nanami smiled, clutching her little plush closer. “We just have to get through, okay? We just have to…” She yawned. “…do our best.”

Not that he wasn't grateful she was here, but he did wish she’d had time to catch a nap before meeting her untimely end.

“Do our best,” he repeated. He held the newfound burst of calm in his mouth, wondering if he’d be better off fighting it off or holding fast. “Do our best at what?”

She pulled out her phone and held out the screen to him; GET TO 104 was written in plain, clinical letters on her messaging screen. Sender unknown. 104 was close to here, wasn’t it? But why… “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen,” she said simply, putting her phone back in her jacket pocket. “But we get a new mission every day, and this one seems pretty simple, right? One day at a time. I think we can find a way.”

“One day at a time,” he repeated, then realized he was beginning to sound like a parrot. Quickly, he added, “Right. But how long can we keep that up?”

She smiled again. It felt, he thought, a little forced this time. “Well, hopefully…” She raised a finger up to eye-level, pointed up, and Hinata paled. Every jumbotron and screen in the city was ablaze, all lit up with the same message: 7 DAYS.

You know what? Being a parrot was fine, actually. He needed to borrow some of her calm. “Hopefully,” he said, and meant it.

* * *

 

 “So how did you die?”

Hinata cringes even as the question leaves his mouth. Nice going, Hajime, way to really ramp up those dazzling conversational skills and bonding techniques. Not that Komaeda needed much impressing, but – look, Nanami had immediately volunteered the information herself upon meeting, right? Maybe it’s some kind of Reaper’s Game etiquette. Not like Komaeda will know any better than him.

Komaeda, fortunately, doesn’t seem offended; rather, he just smiles brightly, threading through the floods of people like he can’t be bothered to remember he’s untouchable. “Oh, don’t worry, Hinata-kun,” he says, sounding for all the world like a reassuring confidant instead of a dead teenager. “You don’t have to concern yourself with someone as insignificant as me. Focusing on getting your old partner back is a much worthier use of your time!”

“I’m not…” Hinata frowns. He’s not really sure what to make of Komaeda when he gets like this, which is already  _often_ despite the negligible time they’ve known each other. Arguing is usually pointless, but it feels heartless not to try. He tries for a middle road. “You’re my partner, right? We need to work together.”

Komaeda seems to consider this. “A convincing argument,” he concedes. “Though I assure you I intend to cooperate with you in any way you ask of me, Hinata-kun!" Hinata wonders briefly if he'll ever get a concession without a caveat before Komaeda interrupts with another line of conversation. "You know, I really am lucky -- to have a partner whose talents already won them a game.”

Which… admittedly,  _is_ pretty lucky, in a way, but not what Hinata asked in the first place. And he’s not sure that his talent, whatever it is, had anything to do with him getting through the first round –

Komaeda, Hinata’s noticed, is pretty good at deflecting, even when Hinata notices what he’s doing right then and there. Hinata’s beginning to think he himself might just be self-involved.

The mission today is simple, something akin to busy work – a simple quota of Monokumas to mow through and then it’s night-night til the next mission comes through. Maybe if they’re lucky they’ll have time to knock around some shops or something. Anything with the Reaper’s Game insignia on it is a sort of liminal space, at least enough so that while inside players can jump from Luigi’s Haunted Mansion to. Uh. Some gacha game. Look, he’s shaky on the metaphysical mechanics and on any game that’s come out in the past ten years. Maybe Nanami will come back just to smack him.

The point is, it leaves some room for the radio silence to get awkward fast. Komaeda seems content to let it sit like that, and Hinata probably should be too, but… but. Something about Komaeda is undeniably magnetic, appealing and disconcerting in the same stroke, and if nothing else it feels inexplicably ill-advised to leave him to his own devices for too long.

He’s wracking his brain for sufficient post-mortem conversation topics when they come across another pair of players, the first he’s encountered this week. This isn’t weird in and of itself; he and Nanami encountered dozens of other players, from a perky swimmer partnered with her (intimidatingly buff) girlfriend to a squabbling student-and-motorcyclist duo. This particular pair just happens to be especially mismatched: one, impressive in his size with a stern expression and an impeccably-tailored suit, and the other a tiny… chef, maybe? He certainly looks the part, at least, with an apron and uniform and all. He’s also the closest to  _over_ - _groomed_  as anyone Hinata’s ever met.

It’s a pretty brief exchange, at least for Hinata. A Monokuma snatched their phones before they could check the day’s mission; the phones will regenerate tomorrow, but if they want there to  _be_ a tomorrow they need to completely the mission for today. Then Komaeda has a coughing fit something awful and asks Hinata to grab him some water from the (properly insignia’d) stand nearby, which he does because, well. They may already be dead, but Komaeda  _really_ looks one case of the common cold from out-and-out vampirism.

The chef smacks Hinata’s ass as he leaves. He’s not too disappointed that the two are making their way through the crowd by the time he gets back.

“That was fast,” he says, handing Komaeda a bottle of water. 500 yen, Jesus Christ. Shouldn't death put an end to this whole budgeting thing? It’s a good thing Monokumas drop cash. “Pretty simple mission though – shame, we could’ve all teamed up.”

“Oh, maybe some other time," Komaeda says, and there's something... off, about that, about the low lilt to his voice. Still, he smiles serenely.  "I told them the mission was just to go to Molco, for now.”

At which point the day kind of goes to shit. 

* * *

 

“So how do you, like… know so much about the game?” Hinata asked, clearing Monokumas with his toy gun. Nanami stood swaying by his side while her plush did the work; he was sure it was some kind of mental effort, but it definitely seemed like it suited her.

She yawned, scratching her head a little. “It’s not that,” she said. “All the players got an info-dump, sort of. I think your memories of it maybe got… kind of… wiped away with the rest? You know, your talent and your death.”

Blunt as ever. “Maybe. Some sloppy management, though – did that info-dump happen to include why these missions are so…”

Nanami shook her head, smile slicing up her cheek. “At least this one’s tame, right?”

“I guess. Ensuring anime ad success doesn’t really seem like the dead’s problem, though.”

“Hinata-kun!” And hey, that voice was new. Day two of being walking talking mist or whatever was already seeing a dull in his ability to be surprised, even more apparent when the stranger-who-apparently-knew-his-name appeared to be–

A… maid…? Housekeeper. Extra off the set of an entirely-adult production of Alice in Wonderland. Something like that. She waved them both down eagerly, her hair waving in a comet-tail behind her.

“Hinata-kun,” she said again, quieter now that she’d gotten closer. A little out of breath, too, and did the dead need to be so frazzled? “And Nanami-san. I’m glad I caught you – you were talking about the mission, weren’t you? Here, let me buy you an ice cream.”

“Uh,” Hinata said articulately. Okay, maybe the sense of surprise wasn’t entirely dulled. All the other players they’d met so far had been kids their age, so why…

“Yukizome-san,” Nanami said, falling into step beside her. Hinata followed dumbly. “You probably don’t remember, Hinata-kun. This is the Game Master.”

Game Master. As in Reaper’s Game?

“You… put us here?” Hinata asked flatly. That was – a lot to swallow, on the one hand, but on the other, was someone like this even capable of that?

“No, no!” Yukizome said, hands flapping wildly. “You all died of completely natural causes, not anything to do with the Game – that would defeat the purpose in the first place! I’m just overseeing things this time around.” She straightened, hands smoothing her… apron dress, and when she spoke again she seemed undeniably more together. “Your memories were taken, right, Hinata-kun? That’s a hard entry fee to grapple with – identity is crucial, especially when you’re so young. But please remember this: the Reaper’s Game is only here to help keep hope in the world.”

And there were – a million questions to ask, there, but one came out victorious among all the rest. “Entry fee?”

“We all had something taken from us,” Nanami said, and surprise unraveled across Yukizome’s face. “At the start of the Game. We’ll get it back if we win, and… also to come back to life, right?”

When Yukizome smiled it felt like a sunrise; Hinata thought, fleetingly, that she could’ve been a great teacher when she was alive. She handed them both ice pops from the stand. “Well-said, Nanami-san! Many players have difficulty believing they’ve passed on, especially since they’re usually so young… it’s a terrible thing to face. The entry fee helps them believe, and adds a less gloomy thing than mortality to focus on when trying to win the game.”

Less gloomy, right. Hinata wasn’t sure that he’d consider forced amnesia an entirely chipper subject, but he could see where she was coming from. “Then… Nanami, you…?”

Nanami looked embarrassed, suddenly. “…I don’t understand mine,” she admitted, and it was the first time Hinata had seen her anything less than completely confident. “It was my 3DS? I love video games, and they’re my talent, but that’s…”

Right. Dissatisfying to think a machine you can buy on eBay is your most important thing in life. He put a hand on her shoulder awkwardly, only to find Yukizome was doing the same opposite him.

“Cheer up, Nanami-san,” she said warmly. “Entry fees are rarely what you think, and not always so straightforward. I think you’ve already come a long way.”

Nanami blinked, then pressed a hand to her chest, plush swinging lightly by her side. It was hard to tell in the shade by the stand, but Hinata thought she might be blushing. “Yukizome-san–”

“Oh, I need to go!” she said suddenly, frantic air returning all at once. Her skirts flew about her in a flurry. “Game Master business, and – oh! The mission!” She turned back again, still walking in the general direction of Away. “They’re all meant to be strengthen your resolve! It’s okay if it seems silly – just do your best, and trust your partner!”

She disappeared in a frenzy of blue and orange, and Hinata turned back to Nanami. “Well, if anime ads will keep us alive…” He shook his head. “But hey, she seemed nice. At least we know this game isn’t being run by some freak bent on our failure.”

Nanami hummed, still staring into the distance. “Yeah,” she said absently. Oh, okay. So it was like  _that._

Hinata cleared his throat, trying not to utterly obliterate himself with how awkward he was inevitably about to be. “Hey,” he said, nudging her lightly to make sure his efforts at being a person didn’t go completely unnoticed. “I think she’s right, you know. I know we don’t, like… know each other, really, but. You’ve been really helpful to me. So… you know, thanks.” Not exactly what he’d set out trying to say, but close enough, and he didn’t burst into flames with a show of emotion, so you know. Good on him.

She smiled, head falling to the side. “…Don’t mention it. Now c’mon – let’s get to the mission.”

“Right, right,” he said, laughing. And then: “Oh, hey. I keep forgetting to ask – I know you use it to fight with, but it seems special to you, so I assume you didn’t just randomly wake up with it… why do you carry that stuffed dog around?”

“…” Nanami’s eyes went narrow, lips pursing into something sour, and for the first time in life or death Hinata knew true fear. “Her name is Usami,” she said, “and she’s a  _rabbit_.”

(So some weapons are just enchantments of what you already had before. Got it. Cool.)

(Maybe he died with a toy gun in his hand, taking down an army of toy mafiosos and going down like a real toy hero.)

* * *

 

Hinata blinks.

“…Komaeda, you know that’s not the mission, right.”

“Of course!” He sips his water cheerfully, letting out a refreshed little  _pah_ and everything. Like he’s a model in an ad for spring water and casual betrayal, and Hinata’s chest – twists, like he hasn’t only known this guy for a day, like the discovery that oh, yeah, some people don’t want to help you is going to choke him apart. “But it's not exactly a fair game if no one is playing to win. And the despair of being betrayed by a fellow player will only serve to strengthen their hope that they’ll triumph in the end, don't you think! It’s a plan from someone like me and all, but all things considered it’s pretty win-win.”

“Hey, what the  _hell_?” Hinata demands, yanking Komaeda closer by the wrist. The latter grins through the wince, and Hinata makes sure not to let his nails dig into Komaeda’s skin despite himself. “If we don’t clear the missions we get erased, remember! You basically just sent those two to die!” Maybe, some distant part of him thinks, there’s something wrong with him. Maybe there’s something wrong and he’s not really...

But Komaeda just blinks at him, back to the wall and all. Graffiti sprawls out from behind his shoulders like a pair of reaper's wings. “But Hinata-kun,” he says, slowly, like  _Hinata’s_ the unreasonable one here, “if a little suggestion from someone so insignificant as me is going to completely derail them, they must not be that good at the game, don’t you think?”

His teeth are clenched. “Who  _cares_ about any of that? You do realize your-- self-worth or whatever doesn't exempt you from consequences, right?”

“Self-worth?" he parrots. His eyebrows disappear into his hairline. "I think you've got the wrong idea there. I'm perfectly aware that I have no significance or value whatsoever. That's why I  _have_ to enact those consequences." When Hinata's grip on his wrist doesn't falter, he continues, "The Reaper’s Game is meant to weed out and lift up the strongest hope, you know? The hope worthy of resurrection, which will prosper above all others if given a new chance at life. Think of being misled a little as…”  He motions absently with his hand. “A stepping stone! A little despair that will leave them shining even brighter in the end.”

“You  _lied_ to them–-”

“And if they’re worthy of winning, they’ll notice.” He slides his wrist through Hinata’s grip, only to hold Hinata’s hand with both his own, bring it to his chest. It's a dark mirror of their first meeting, and it hits Hinata between the eyes. He would startle, maybe fluster, if he wasn’t so unnerved by the notion behind the gesture itself.

Earnestness. He… really wants Hinata to understand.

Something about that strikes him as terrifying and sad in equal measure. The heartbeat under his hand -- should they even have heartbeats? Should their hands even be warm, the way Komaeda's are on his own? Or maybe it's all just a memory, a phantom of what should be -- is steady and solid; his hair falls in sheaves over his face. He thinks about brushing it back, how that hair would feel under his hands, and he swallows. “Komaeda,” he says, tongue and heart heavy in his mouth. “You don’t get to decide what other people have to go through. Causing, uh, despair for the sake of hope – it’s still–”

It’s like flipping a switch; for the first time they’ve met, Komaeda looks outright  _disdainful,_ physically withdrawing into himself and looking down on Hinata with a sneer. “And you do?” he says, and for the first time it occurs to Hinata how low Komaeda’s voice is, now that it’s dripping something dubious and imperious. The hand Komaeda dropped falls limply to his side, alight with phantom sensation. “You may not remember your worth, Hinata-kun, but I know mine. This is what I can do for people who  _matter._ ”

He opens his mouth, but closes it before he can say anything more. What does he even say to that? Admonish the self-deprecation of someone who may have just sent two people to their deaths? Rebuff an entire morality system in the span of one conversation? Of one week? Yeah right. He's just one guy. He's not... cut out for shit like this. Thinking that he ever could be was a mistake.

But–-

If he has some huge falling out with his partner now, he literally can’t complete the game, and if that happens he’s signing off on funeral arrangements for himself and Nanami both. It’s only a few more days, right? For Nanami.

People who matter, huh.

 “Komaeda,” he says, slowly. “I don’t like this. I can’t agree with it, and I’m going to stop you if you do pull anything else, but you’re my partner, and we need to work together. So let’s just… drop it. Okay?”

The sneer melts away like it was never there, and somehow that’s more intimidating than its existence in the first place. Hinata wonders briefly how many faces Komaeda keeps up his sleeve, even as the current one beams at him, the same harmless innocuity as that meeting at Hachiko. “An attitude befitting a player in the Reaper’s Game!” he says. “I’m sure you’ll come to understand, eventually – or maybe not. I think that would be okay too! I really do feel a connection with you, but I’m used to being misunderstood. And someone like you shouldn’t have to trouble yourself with the thought patterns of such a lowly person anyway.”

Hinata sighs, turns to walk away. The game has pretty reliably kept exhaustion at bay, barring situations where combat gets particularly tough, but right now he’s really starting to feel it.

“And besides,” Komaeda calls cheerily after him, voice sunflower-yellow, “the despair you felt when you had to play the game again, and Nanami-san became your entry fee – hasn’t it only served to make your hope for the end burn more brightly than it ever could have been before?”

Hinata’s teeth grind, a mouthful of gears stuck suddenly at a halt.

For Nanami.

* * *

 

Things get… a little tense after that.

It’s not like Komaeda killed anyone, exactly, and yeah they’re “already dead being given another chance at life blah blah blah” whatever the fuck, but it’s still shady as hell and being in such close quarters literally every waking moment puts Hinata on edge. The way his ribs twist up in his chest with the proximity puts him even more on edge. Things do seem to pass without incident after that, at least, other than Komaeda’s usual torrent of casual and self-deprecating remarks that Hinata can’t  _quite_ convince himself aren’t digs at him. It’s… fine. He just has to get through a few more days.

Just a few more days.

“Hajime-chaaaaaan!”

Oh god.

“Mioda,” he says with a grimace, or tries to, before something small and heavy hits him in the side. A flying bundle of blue and purple and pink popstar, with the spines of little black wings sprouting from her shoulderblades. That last bit being invisible to her fanbase and any living passerby, naturally. “Hi.”

For what it’s worth, Komaeda's expression unfurls into something as close to genuine surprise as Hinata's seen it, and that’s – definitely something Hinata treasures, at least a little bit. “You…" And then he smiles, big enough that the lines of his cheeks look painful. "Ah! Hinata-kun’s talent is  _definitely_ something extraordinary, then, if he’s dating a reaper.”

Hinata rolls his eyes as best as he can while Mioda noogies him. “Not dating. Mission from last week. She hit on my partner the whole time.”

“Hajime-chan  _wishes_ he was dating Ibuki!” Mioda puffs out her chest proudly. “Instead Ibuki made out with his partner while he erased Monokumas in the venue.”

“Yeah I  _thought_ so,” Hinata says sourly. He actually thinks Mioda is pretty fun, in a  _that friend you love but are always sure to keep an eye on lest they decide to commit arson on a whim_ kind of way, but if he doesn’t play the Brain to her Pinky she’ll probably go entirely overboard. “Anyway, what’s up, Mioda? We’ve got to clear today’s mission.” Which hasn’t come in yet, but better not to get her started.

Mioda groans loudly and twists her hands so hard they go white. Hinata tries not to interfere with her work. “Ibuki needs help! There’s supposed to be a concert tonight, but Sayaka-chan and Kaede-chan are nowhere to be found, and… Hajime-chan was such a big help last time, sooo…”

“Erm, I’m glad we helped. Really.” Well, not so much Nanami, who helped more with clearing out Mioda’s tonsils, but semantics. “But we’ve gotta focus on missions, you know? Or we’ll get erased.”

Mioda’s eyes light up. “Oh, is that all! One secomundo.” She takes out her phone and tap-tap-taps away for just a second, and then Hinata’s buzzes in his pocket. In the corner of his eye, he sees Komaeda fish his own out. Oh boy.

 _plz help ibuki get the band back together!!!_   _☆_ _*:._   _｡_ _.o(_   _≧▽≦_ _)o._   _｡_ _.:*_   _☆_

“You made it the mission,” Hinata says flatly. Of course she did. No use wondering if reapers were even allowed to do that in the first place, since she clearly... well, whatever. She beams back at him, glowing with pride.

“Well, there’s nothing for it,” Komaeda says, sounding entirely too amused. Well at least someone’s happy. Undoubtedly more due to Hinata's distress than anything else. “Mioda-san, do you have any idea of where your bandmates might be?”

“Good question, Hajime-chan’s boyfriend!”

“He’s not–-”

“I’m Komaeda Nagito,” Komaeda says. Hinata wonders, sourly, just who he was trying to interrupt.

“Well, Nagito-chan! We got into a big big  _big_ fight! And I think Sayaka-chan and Kaede-chan went to the ramen shop? But who knows!”

Hinata pinches the bridge of his nose. Okay. Apparently they’re gonna do this, now – not that they have a choice or anything. “Which ramen shop,” he asks blearily, though he has a sinking feeling he knows the answer. Mioda's answer, at least.

Mioda shrugs. “Dunno!”

“We’ll figure it out,” Komaeda cuts in, taking Hinata by the arm and nearly dragging him away. Hinata doesn't even have the energy to push him off. It's like he's caught between two magnets, both repelling his ability to exist at equal rates. “Good luck with your performance, Mioda-san!”

“Ibuki doesn’t need luck!” Mioda calls after them. Hinata can picture the macho man pose she’s probably warped into. “Luck needs Ibuki!”

He waits until they’re a little ways away to say anything. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he says flatly, “but a mission put out by a reaper is as good as anything, you know. We do have to take this seriously.”

“Of course I do! You have my word, I’m not leading you astray – oh, though I suppose the word of someone so abominable as me isn’t worth m–”

“Your word, got it,” he interrupts. He doesn’t have the energy to dissect each of Komaeda’s sentences for errors right now, line them neatly in color-code and give return them repackaged and graded.

Still, he must emanate gloom to some extent, because Komaeda pats his shoulder. “Have hope!” he admonishes, cheerful despite it all. “You've been thinking that since you died, or else you wouldn't be here in the first place! Right, Hinata-kun?”

Since he died?

Hinata steals a sidelong glance at Komaeda, at the cityscape’s long and jagged row of teeth that cast the streetlife into soft and decaying shadows. At the outline of his partner against the wall – and it must be the stress, from the mission or maybe the timer on his hand, because in Komaeda’s shadow on the alley wall he thinks he sees a gaping hole, light pouring through his chest, the stretch of something birdlike from his shoulderblades; the emptiness of nothing at all. He grunts, blinks the illusion out of his eyes like sleep.

Nothing good can come from hanging out with the dead for this long. 

* * *

 

Yukizome wasn’t the only… colorful person they met within the first few days.

Hinata supposed it made sense. It wasn’t as if a city as colorful and  _alive_ as Shibuya would be wanting for talented teenagers, after all; the fact that some of them happened to die was, well… sobering, sure, but it’s not like Hinata was exactly in a place to be pitying anyone on the mortality front. And now they were fighting to stay alive anyway, right? So, uh, silver linings.

Though those could… also be pulled out from under you pretty easily.

“Natsumi, oi! What the hell do you think you’re doing!” was the first thing Hinata heard when they got out of battle, harsh enough to make him forget, momentarily, that his name was  _not_  in fact Natsumi and as such he did  _not_  need to hunch up like that. The lone blonde girl they’d launched into a Monokuma pile to protect wasn’t so lone anymore, though she looked all the more annoyed for it; a notably shorter guy with the same sharp, knife’s-edge-pretty features was shaking her shoulders pretty hard. Both about their age, Hinata guessed.

“Buzz off, shithead _,_ ” she grumbled, and wow, Hinata didn't know which one of their glares he would least like to be on the receiving end of. “I can fight just as well as you can.”

“That’s not how this fucking game works and you know it–!”

“Uh,” Hinata said to Nanami out of the corner of his mouth. Not that other players could  _expressly_ do harm to each other or anything, but he’d seen enough family dramas to see where this one was going. “Do you think maybe we should–”

She did not, apparently, think maybe they should. “Hey,” she said, calm and vacant as ever. Hinata cringed a little. “You two shouldn’t fight. You’re partners, right?”

This set off another round of arguing. Nanami as a common enemy, at least, seemed to serve them well.

“It’s fine,” she said to Hinata. Then: “Hey! If you can’t get along with each other, get along with us. He’s right that you can’t play this game alone, but… if you fight, that’s no good either, I think.”

The girl’s eyes, brilliant and green, went narrow. “So you think because you barged in without asking,” she said, fully unimpressed, “that this is your business now.”

“Uh,” Hinata said again. He was, if nothing else, really ringing it in on the conversational skills today; the set of glares in their general direction was  _really_ not helping. “Nanami–”

Nanami didn’t so much as look his way. “This is my partner,” she said. “Hinata-kun. He’s not… very good at this. Will you help us?”

“Hey–!”

But he was cut off by himself more than anything, shrinking suddenly under the weight of two sets of sharp eyes on him. They were well-dressed, Hinata noticed, almost deliriously. Wearing dress shoes and everything. Like going to church. “Yeah,” the girl said slowly. Appraisingly, almost. “Yeah, I can see that.”

The boy sighed, nodding around a tiny quirk in his mouth. “Well, if that’s the case… I guess we’ve got no choice, huh, Natsumi.” He tossed up a two-finger salute. “Yo! Kuzuryuu Fuyuhiko. This here’s Natsumi.”

“I can introduce myself!” She elbowed him in the ribs. “But yeah, Natsumi. I don’t… remember my last name right now, so just stick a  _-san_ on the end or I’ll stick a knife in your guts or whatever.”

Hinata blinked. “You don’t remember your last name?”

“Bullshit, right?” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and grinned at him, something that seemed more threatening than regretful. “Don’t remember my last name or my family or nothin’ but remember all these cool ways to stab people. Wanna see?”

Kuzuryuu’s hand landed squarely on her shoulder. “Calm down, idiot.” Then, to Hinata and Nanami: “Must’ve been her entry fee or something – that and her fuckin’ impulse control, assuming she ever had any.” His expression darkened a little. “But don’t go getting any sick ideas just because she doesn’t remember shit, o–”

“Shut  _up!_ ” Natsumi demanded, aiming a stomp to his foot. Kuzuryuu dodged with a practiced grace. “I swear to God, I meet this guy three days ago and he thinks he’s my big brother or somethin’.”

Over her shoulder, Hinata could see Kuzuryuu’s mouth twist, just a little.

They finished the mission together. 

* * *

 

“And you’re sure this is the right place.”

Komaeda’s humming something happy and tranquil as he looks over a menu, feet kicking a little under the table. The place he led them to is…  _small_  isn’t the right word, exactly, because it implies its size is what strikes you first when you walk in. He wants to say run-down. Dim and clearly having seen better days; sorta sticky, despite how clean it is. Komaeda seems to glow under the fluorescents.

“I’m sure,” Komaeda’s saying, and oh, right, Hinata asked a question. “It was pretty well-covered story about their band a while back, but the buzz faded enough that business looks like it’s back to normal…”

“You into celebrity gossip or something?” He's hungry enough to find the thought equally cute and strange, which would be more disheartening if he wasn't so relieved to remember the dead can  _eat._ Monokumas are vicious little fuckers, especially in mission-related areas -- thank you, Mioda -- so at the very less the battle-strain is a step in the right direction.

Komaeda cocks his head just a little, casting a surprised look over the top of his menu. Hinata can’t see his mouth, but it looks like he’s smiling. “I think that makes you out of touch more than anything,” he says. “It was a pretty big story.”

“Right.”

“Right!”

They sit for a minute. Hinata double-checks to make sure the shop has an insignia, though reapers would be able to see them anyway. They sit for a few more minutes. They order. Sit.

“You seem tense,” Komaeda says, finally. Concern is heavy in his voice, which would be nice if he weren't. Well. “You don’t have to look so serious – we’re partners, after all! I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

“Everyone playing this game is our partner,” he says. Which -- wow, he hopes that sounded sufficiently sour to distract Komaeda from how free-love it kinda was. Even if Komaeda sounds earnest enough that it's... kind of hard not to believe him. “We’ve got missions and Monokumas and reapers to worry about –- not…” He looks down at a little scar on his hand, already healing, and grimaces. “…not all of them are as nice as Mioda, you know. People are fighting for their lives out there, and you…”

Komaeda sighs, watching mournfully as the he swirls his straw in his tea. “You still don’t understand. Ah, but I suppose that’s to be expected, given my woeful ability to communicate…" He shakes his head, and Hinata half expects another long conversational drought when he suddenly switches tracks. "Say, Hinata-kun, have you ever heard the We’ll See proverb?”

Hinata blinks. “I don’t think so?”

“It’s something like this,” he says, already gesticulating into what little space he allows himself to take up: “A farmer’s only horse runs away into the woods and can’t be found. The whole village laments his terrible stroke of luck! But he just says  _Maybe not, maybe so. We’ll see._ ”

He fixes Hinata with an expectant look. It doesn’t take. “…is that it?”

But it must not be, because his face lights up; with a flourish of long fingers over his straw, he brings a tapioca pearl out of his tea, placing it with surgical precision on the knit of his mat. Like it’s something precious. “But then! But then, the horse comes back to its farmer, leading with it a pack of mares. The village says,  _Such good luck!_ But the farmer just says the same as before –  _We’ll see._ ”

“Right,” Hinata says. Komaeda places another tapioca pearl mere inches from the other, with that same knife-cut precision. They form a direct line between himself and Komaeda, he realizes. “Silver linings.”

“Nothing like that, Hinata-kun.” He shakes his head, and part of Hinata -- the same part that felt so alight at Komaeda’s fawning back at Hachiko -- feels a stab of distress at the spill of disappointment on his face. “Try again – the farmer’s son falls from the roof and breaks his leg.  _Such bad luck,_ and  _We’ll see,_ so on and so forth.”

He considers asking if it’s the same farmer. He figures it probably doesn’t matter. “Father of the year.”

Komaeda lets that slide. Another tapioca pearl, making for another, a string of them bisecting the table like a dark planetary alignment. It's hypnotic just to watch. “But when the draft comes the next day…”

“Right, right,” he says, hands up in mock surrender, “I get it. Just – why do you ask?”

“Because that’s my life, Hinata-kun!” And Komaeda smiles at him, like he’s just pulled the string to reveal some whole grand mystery. “Or, I suppose, my luck. One in the same, really.”

Which doesn’t sit quite right with Hinata, but hey, what does he know. He frowns. “Explain.”

Komaeda leans in, eyes aglow and sea-glassy under the dim overhead light. “There wasn’t a magazine story, Hinata-kun," he says. Conspiratorial, like that.

His pulse, or some memory of it, jumps just a little. Dangerous.

So he coughs, shakes his head. “The, uh, mission. If you didn’t know it, you shouldn't have-”

“Hmm?” The corner of Komaeda’s mouth quirks a little, self-satisfied but genuine. “Oh, they’ve been sitting at the bar for a while now. I thought it would be improper to interrupt our conversation... Someone as sharp as Hinata-kun presumably noticed for himself, of course. Just awaiting your say-so.”

Hinata glances over at the bar and – dammit, those sure are the two girls that were with Mioda last week. They must have been in the bathroom or something when he and Komaeda came in. That’s what he gets for being distracted by. Conversation. They shift into motion, and all the better -- getting things done rather than letting Komaeda run around in his head, right? -- but...

“Komaeda,” he says. The other looks back at him as he stands, hair falling into his face. “What happens at the end of it all?”

The look on Komaeda’s face is hard to name – something between wide-eyed terror and absolute bliss.  _Elated_ , Hinata settles on. He looks something like elated.

“Who’s to say until then, Hinata-kun! But hopefully…” He flicks the tapioca pearl closest to him, sending it into a quick domino effect across the table. One plods against Hinata’s chest; in a moment of pure reflex, he jerks his cup to rest in his lap, and it lands squarely with a  _plop._ He blinks as it drowns in his tea. “…something miraculous!”

* * *

 

 The thing about reapers -- they liked to play games.

The Game Master, ultimately, was the person responsible for putting out missions, but reapers were there to keep the game going – maintain rules, have competitions amongst themselves, and send Monokumas after the players to help them get stronger. Or… to pick off the weak. Hinata hadn’t met too many, and honestly wasn’t sure what to make of them. In the hypothetical, they were terrifying – walking myths who existed solely to help push the deaths of teenagers to completion, usually through battle. One foot in the world of the living, one foot in the world of the dead, two little black wings to mark them as such. So on and so forth.

On the other hand, Nanami had just made out with one who seemed more interested in writing an “ectosludge-rock ballad” and passing the baton while on the clock than bothering anyone, so… Mileage could vary, he guessed.

“Just like living people!” Yukizome said. She was sitting with them on a fountain near Hachiko, making a valiant effort to keep an ice-pop from dripping onto her hands. “Right, Nanami-san?”

Nanami responded by continuing to doze off sitting up.

“I don’t see how playing nice with a bunch of reapers is going to get us out of here any faster,” Kuzuryuu said instead. His mouth was cherry-red from his own shaved ice; Hinata thought he looked pretty cute and felt an instinctive jolt of fear for his organs at letting the words form in his mind.

Yukizome tutted. “It’s not about speed,” she said. “Or about playing nice. It’s about seeing things for what they are.”

Natsumi laughed under her breath. “Haha. Dummy, Kuzuryuu.”

“You–!”

But she was too fast for him; she slid off the ledge with a huff, pulling her hair back from her face. “If you losers are just gonna sit and talk about how to get out of here,” she said breezily, “I’m gonna go get something from the sweets stand after all.”

Kuzuryuu frowned. “You shouldn’t go alone. I’ll–”

“ _Jeez_ , you’re overprotective. I’ll be fine, okay? You can see the stand from here,  _part-ner._ ”

He rolled his eyed and nodded, shooed her away, but the air of hesitance only thickened as Natsumi wove into the crowd. Hinata traced his fingers over the fountain ledge, chewing on the inside of his cheek. There was a certain anxiety that came with prying into someone’s business, especially someone like Kuzuryuu, but… fuck it, couldn’t let Nanami do all the friend-making, right?

“Yo, Kuzuryuu,” he said. “You and Natsumi, uh…”

Kuzuryuu’s eyes narrowed, even as his cheek rested against the knee pulled to his chest. “What? You got something to say?”

Shit. Abort, abort,  _this_ was why he let Nanami do these things – apparently he just had the face of a pervert or something. “No!” he ammended hastily, palms up and open to… plead, or protect, or something. “No, I just meant… you’re really protective of her, you know? And you look a lot alike…”

Kuzuryuu blinked, and little by little he seemed to soften and unfurl, lashes brushing his cheek as he thought it over. “Yeah,” he said eventually. “She’s… my sister. Hell of a brat, isn’t she?”

“Little sister?” Well that-- okay, definitely made sense, yeah, but… “Does her entry fee keep you from telling her, or…?”

He looked away. Coughed. “Yeah, that whole deal – Natsumi’s memories weren’t her entry fee. They’re mine.”

And that… Christ. Fighting for himself and for his friend he’d just met already felt like enough to make his knees buckle most days, but to have your family there… and they don’t even  _remember_ …

“Kuzuryuu-kun and Natsumi-san partnered mostly by chance,” Yukizome cut in gently. “Even if Kuzuryuu-kun were to try and jog her memory, it wouldn’t do any good… The memories simply aren’t there.”

Kuzuryuu snorted. “Yeah, like I’d even bother with that. She’s enough of a terror already without her harassing me for being a weirdo, thinking I’m her brother or something.” Still, he looked straight ahead, eyes locked on where Natsumi was laughing with the girl working the cart. “I can only guess at what her entry fee was, but… I’m gonna get it back. I’m gonna get both of them back.”

Hinata looked down at the sun-warmed ledge, at his own hand. He nodded, slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. We’re all… we’re all gonna get back what’s ours. We’re all gonna go home.”

“She must be important to you,” Nanami said, half a yawn if anything. Still, she was smiling, hazy and warm. “If that was your entry fee.”

A sharp little scoffing noise clicked in his throat; if possible, his cheeks flushed even pinker. But even as he looked away, hand curled over his face, he said gruffly, “Yeah. Yeah, the most important.”

It happened too quickly to see, really – a ribbon of bright, brilliant yellow among the crowds in the afternoon sun, a Monokuma trap opening up in the pavement. If Hinata had to pick a word, it’d probably be… unfair. They’d barely registered anything – just a flicker of movement, nothing else – before the scream hit, deaf to the ears of the living but instantly the realest thing Hinata had felt all week. That scream. Long, babydoll lashes, wide; dress shoes running across the cement. A ribbon of bright and brilliant yellow light

He almost-– almost got to her. Unfair. She glitched out right before their eyes, shaved ice splattering like pearls on the pavement.

Somewhere up above, impossibly high, he could hear someone chirping. “ _Yahoo_!” The shadow of black wings. “Got one!”

Reaper games. 

* * *

 

Reaper games.

“Koizumi,” he wheedles. “Let us through,  _please._ ”

Koizumi cuts a sharp profile against the corner, hand firmly on hip and mouth slashing at the same angle as her shoulders. “Not gonna cut it,”she says. “You should know the rules better than anyone, Hinata. If you want to get through the wall, do the errand.”

“But there’s not even a mission, I just want to switch out my–”

Saionji pops her head up and sneers, pigtails bouncing. “Big bro, you’re seriously here again? Was your life so pathetic you went and offed yourself?”

He gives Saionji a lollipop out of his pocket. Thank God his stash carried over from last week. “…Yeah. That’s it. Look, Koizumi, if there’s not a mission, do you really have to–?”

“If there’s no mission, you don’t have any more excuses to slack off,” Koizumi says. He finds himself staring down the barrel of her pointed finger. “This week’s Game Master might be taking it easy, but rules are rules. I’m not going to just let you through without the proper procedure.”

Komaeda hums, one eyebrow arched. “You talk like this is a repeated offense, Koizumi-san,” he says mildly, shoulder bumping against Hinata’s like a raft going ashore. “Did I accidentally get myself partnered up with a rule-breaker?”

Saionji twirls her lollipop, threading it through her teeth only to crunch it between her molars immediately. “A skeleton pervert and big bro’s bland oatmeal-looking ass – augh, Koizumi-nee just let them through, I’m gonna be sick if I have to look at this shit any longer.

In the time it takes Koizumi to fuss with Saionji’s hair fondly, Komaeda has already looped an arm through the crook of Hinata’s elbow. “It’s just a quick run to Spain Hill to find out the brand sales,” he murmurs, like it’s conspiratorial. “I think it’d be a more efficient use of time to just follow rules, hm?”

“Rich coming from you," he says with a snort, nudging his elbow into Komaeda's side. "Still, Saionji is… definitely…”

"Really?" Komaeda says. He sounds astonished, voice still low despite their growing distance. "Koizumi-san is infinitely more frightening to me... Perhaps your talent is something truly daredevilish, hm?"

Hinata laughs despite himself.

* * *

 

“Let me go!” Kuzuryuu spat. Yukizome’s hands stayed wrapped fast around his arms, keeping him in place; some distant part of Hinata noted that she was much,  _much_  stronger than she looked. “ _Let me fucking go! I’ll kill them!”_

“Kuzuryuu-kun!” Yukizome said. Pleaded, almost, frantic. “Kuzuryuu-kun, calm down! I know you must be hurting, but–!”

“You have no  _fucking_ idea how I feel–”

Hinata put a hand on his shoulder, remiss for anything else to do. “Kuzuryuu, hey!” he said. “Don’t be stupid – don’t throw your life away on–”

Kuzuryuu laughed, a labored choke of a sound wrenched from his throat. “What  _life_ ,” he spat. “Even if I – even if I had a life to live without her, you can’t play the game without a partner, dumbass. I’ll be dead by the end of the day. Just let me take those bastards down with me or I–”

“Yukizome-san,” Nanami said. It was as close to panicked as Hinata had ever seen her, her knuckles all white around her little rabbit plush, her eyes wide and bright. “There has to be another way, right? We can’t just let him…”

There was something to the way the resolve solidified on Yukizome’s face, came together from the corners of her presence into a laser-like focus; like Nanami’s plea was the last push over the edge into action rather than the first tug. Interesting. In the panicked collapse, he clung to the hope that it was an indicator of good character rather than not.

“Kuzuryuu-kun,” she said. Gentle as ever, but there was an iron to her as she put a hand on his shoulder – there was something grisled to it, like a mafioso and an underling. “I need you to trust in me and follow along. For Natsumi-san.”

Kuzuryuu snarled. “Don’t you dare say…” But she just looked at him steadily, grip tight on his shoulder, and he – faltered. Just enough. His eyes skittered towards the splatter of shaved ice on the pavement, and he faltered. “Fine,” he said. “But if this isn’t worth my while, I’m taking every last one of you to hell, you understand me?”

And they were gone.

Somewhere in the street, there was a high, strangled little laugh; Hinata realized, abrupt and embarrased, that it was him. “What,” he wheezed out, seemingly unable to stop the torrent, “the  _hell._ ”

Nanami’s mouth was drawn thin, hard. Grim. It was the first time he’d seen her so – out of sorts.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was still a little tinny in his own ears, but, well. He put a hand on her shoulder gingerly. “You okay?”

The streetlife milled about unaware. Around them, through them, everywhere, intoxicating and full of life they’d been denied again and again. Choices they no longer had. It took Nanami a moment to answer, closed off to the rest of the world.

“We can’t forgive this,” she said eventually. Circumstances notwithstanding, the sudden gravity in her voice threw him off-kilter. “No matter how friendly the Game can be, we can’t ever forgive something like this.”

He cast his gaze back to Hachiko, the sun glinting on the fountain. So much concrete, landlocked as they were. He thought he could drown there. “Friendly,” he echoed. His laugh was hollow in his own ears. “No danger of that.”

“Hinata-kun.” She turned to him, expression clearing a little. “Are  _you_ okay?”

“Me?” He pinched the bridge of his nose and scanned the horizon. The obvious answer was, well, obvious – he was dead, surrounded by shadows, had just seen his friend’s last chance at life get snapped in half in the blink of an eye. But…

But he had Nanami, and Kuzuryuu was still fighting, and it felt cheap to give up now. The kind of cowardly that made his tongue sour into his stomach.

Besides, he didn’t even know what his talent was yet, right?

“I’m just one kid,” he said eventually. Honestly, like that. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to handle all this.”

For just a moment it looked as though she might initiate contact – maybe to squeeze his arm, or pat his shoulder, something small like that. But she reeled back before anything came of it; instead she smiled at him, small and quiet and reassuring for all the sad wrinkle in her brow. “We’re going to make it,” she said. “Just two more days, right?”

Just two more days. 

* * *

 

Hinata twirls his little toy gun on his fingers post-battle, and Komaeda flinches.

The problem with not giving a shit about Komaeda is, at its core, that it requires not giving a shit about Komaeda.

It isn’t that he’s overly concerned about Komaeda’s post-mortem well-being, exactly; even if he were, Komaeda is more than capable of holding his own in a fight. Rather, Komaeda is endlessly and hopelessly strange, a line of question marks that never quite manages to end. It’s daunting how quickly they fall into a routine like this: Komaeda begins to fascinate Hinata. Hinata asks him an innocuous question. They fall into casual conversation and get along fine. Hinata has to remind Komaeda that increasing the likelihood of death is morally wrong and is again put off by what the hell could  _possibly_ be happening in his head. If working with Nanami was a three-legged race, working with Komaeda is… also a three-legged race, on fire, while one of the participants is actively trying to drown.

Today’s mission is more shenanigans for Mioda, because  _wow_ does this week’s Game Master just not seem to wanna clock in. That’s fine. He can play detective with Komaeda if it means getting through the week faster and not just… meandering around the scramble, waiting for texts from the dead that aren’t ever going to come through.

Komaeda flinches for the third time this afternoon, and for the third time Hinata fails miserably in his mission not to notice.

The problem with not giving a shit about Komaeda is–-

“Hey,” he says, pulling up the map on his phone. Any excuse not to look at him while they talk. “You’re jumpy today. What gives?”

Komaeda steals a glance at him, rueful around the wisps of hair covering his face. “Ah, sorry Hinata-kun.” The way he drones it sounds more rehearsed than anything, a page taken from a cracked-spined book of apologies written years in advance. Like he’d been waiting for a reason to rip it out, anyway. “Not that you expected much better from me, I’m sure, but truth be told I’m a little nervous. If it bothers you I can do my best to bite it back, though as I’m sure you can guess I’m a dreadful actor.”

Hinata considers the ramen shop, that off-the-cuff explanation about a news story. Still, Komaeda’s smile is looking threadbare at best, so he bites back an argument. More and more lately; he’s learned it’s best to pick your battles with Komaeda.  _Now if only I could learn which ones to pick._  “Uh, it’s – fine? I just wanted to ask what was wrong.”

This gets him an owlish little blink, like the sentiment is alien in itself. “…Monokumas are sparse today,” he says eventually. “And I got the ramen shop right. Right?”

“Yeah?” Not for the first time he feels like there’s something he’s not quite getting. “Do you always get so jumpy about good things happening to you?”

Komaeda’s eyes narrow. “Something’s coming. The fact that it’s so late is… worrisome.”

“Something’s…? Oh, your luck, right?” Hinata ducks an alleyway, the one Komaeda had suggested looked like a shortcut – right again. “Look, don’t you ever think that maybe good things just… happen?”

Komaeda fixes him with a look that suggests he does not, in fact, ever think that.

“…right. Okay, well maybe it’s your entry fee?" When that doesn't earn him a response, it occurs to him what exactly he's just implied. "Oh – sorry, I guess that’s stupid. They wouldn’t just take your bad luck as an entry fee. Then…”

But Komaeda slows, a feather on water. Hinata can see, just barely, the hundreds of minute motions in Komaeda’s brow, in the swell of his lower lip, the wrinkle of his nose. They slow to a stop in seconds, and to transcribe and decipher them all would be an impossible task, but…

“Komaeda?”

His head jerks up as though pulled on a marionette string. “Hm? Oh, sorry Hinata-kun,” he says. “I was just thinking.”

 _Obviously,_ Hinata wants to say. Despite himself he can feel a wellspring of concern bubbling uncomfortably in his chest, bile-hot; he does his best to cough it loose. “…If it scares you so much,” he says, with some futile effort to choose his words carefully, “then would it be such a bad thing? If it were gone.”

“Yes,” Komaeda says immediately. His voice is back to its usual pleasant strike, but it’s distinctly steady. Conviction. “It may not be much of a talent, but it’s mine – it’s what I can do for people who matter.”

People who matter. Hinata wonders about that – what has Komaeda so convinced he doesn’t matter, that playing God with people’s lives and afterlives makes him worthier of existing than just…  _being_. He starts to pose some question like that, maybe dig closer but when he opens his mouth to ask it feels like exposing some part of him that he didn’t know existed, some soft and secret shame tucked into the space behind his teeth. Instead, he says, “I suppose,” slowly, the words foreign in his mouth, “if it doesn’t do too much damage.”

"Damage." Komaeda’s mouth curls something sinuous. “I suppose it depends on how you look at it. I'm an orphan, you know -- because of my luck.”

“That–-” Alarm jumps in his throat. He's been wading through ghosts for nearly two weeks now, but this -- is a new definition to out of his depth, and he's too cowardly to not want to turn back the conversation now. “That couldn’t possibly be your fault.”

A shrug. “Meteorite. The only survivor – oh, but I inherited a fortune! And the freedom of a whole estate at that. Kidnapping got me a winning lottery ticket, getting away with faking the flu in grade school got me hospitalized with whooping cough a month later." He laughs, something small, like it's a joke just for himself. Hard to argue with that. "Or maybe the dementia. Or the lymphoma."

"That's..."  _Impossible. That's impossible._ But damn if it's hard to properly assess what is or isn't possible right here, in this moment, when people and city-smoke and sunlight are passing through Komaeda like he's nothing at all; damn if he has the heart to argue with what he so clearly believes to be true, even if he could. “So that’s how you died?” he says instead. His heart feels like a cherry stem knotted up in his mouth.

Komaeda shrugs. As good as a yes, then, especially from him. “Does it matter?” he asks. “I’m here now. With you, in fact!”

A deep and angry furrow slashes through Hinata’s brow, repulsed not by Komaeda but rather by whatever circumstances or people or  _anything_ that led him to this– outlook, this casual and horrifying idea that things like  _the reason he died_ don’t matter. This, he thinks, he’s starting to understand. Komaeda may be unbelievably frustrating, and Komaeda may do things that make Hinata's stomach turn, but if it's all steeped in this weird fucking labyrinth of a life he's got going -- one that attributes every sprained ankle, every funeral invitation to the inevitability foretold by his existence -- it's... hard to blame him entirely. No one deserves to be lonely like that.

He doesn’t get a chance to voice it; a Monokuma rush hits before he can say anything, and by the end Komaeda’s suitably worn out that Hinata’s more concerned with bullying him into something to eat than anything else. How lucky.

Later, when the mission is over and the light begins to fade, consciousness streaking out of sight like running drops of paint, he uses the last of his energy to push one hand to his own mouth, and thinks:  _it’s dangerous to want to kiss him._ And then he falls asleep. 

* * *

 

“We have to fight… Yukizome-san?”

_Oh Nanami._

It wasn't that Hinata considered himself a particularly effusive person. Not really sentimental, left the gushing and hugs to his friends while taking the role of  _silent but steady support_ in the background, never really ran into any problems with that, but. There's just something about the way Nanami’s face went blank, settled into something flat and drawn when she saw the seventh mission arrive. Just -- fuck, man, what was he supposed to say to that?

“That’s not fucking fair,” he said, because he knew she wouldn’t. He clapped his phone shut with a  _snap._ “We’ve already gone through so much this week, there’s no reason for us – for  _you_ especially to have to do that. Just…” And he – hesitated.  _Let me handle this; you don’t have to do a thing. Just sit back. Rely on me._ Was that... not the right thing to say? He knew he wanted to, sure, wanted to be that well-to-do offered arm and shoulder more than anything, especially for Nanami, who had been so reliable. But could he even… do that? Yukizome was frivolous and fun, but she was also the Game Master, and he was-- what? Just some dumbshit kid who didn't even know his talent, waving around a toy gun.

“It’s okay,” Nanami said suddenly. Her voice cut through him effectively enough, left him to blanch at her instead. “I think… I think I get it.”

He shifted uneasily. “Nanami…”

“I mean it, okay? Just… don’t hold back. Promise me, yeah?”

He opened his mouth to argue, but her expression was set – fierce and concentrated, and he found himself shutting it before his brain could fully catch up. “Okay,” he said. His chest still ached a little, the way it had seeing Natsumi’s shaved ice splintering across the pavement, the way it had when Kuzuryuu had disappeared. Hinata wondered, dimly, where he was now. “I promise.”

And up to Pork City they went.

Yukizome didn’t talk, while they fought; she just attacked, gladiatorial and shining with ghostly light, He wasn’t sure if that made it worse or better, but then, he didn’t think it was his place to choose; for all it stung, for all it hurt to have to shoot his stupid toy gun at the closest thing they’d had to a mentor, to a  _home_ the past week, this… wasn’t his fight.

“I don’t want to fight you, Yukizome-san,” Nanami said, at a loudest decibel he’d heard from her yet. Yukizome, blank-faced, sent her skittering across the floor.

She didn’t lose her footing. Only looked up, steel-eyed, and nodded.

Usami went flying Yukizome's way, and, well. Far be it from Hinata to be outdone by a plush rabbit.

 _Go time, I guess,_ he thought; and then,  _Wow, let's... forget I ever thought that._

The thing about Nanami was that her talent was endlessly useful like this, in a world more like a game than anything, but more than that it's just who she was. She leapt up; not once did her eyes leave Yukizome's face. “I don’t want to fight you, but I get it,” Nanami said. She sprung up to higher ground while Hinata fired off distractions in Yukizome’s general direction. “I know why we have to do this, Yukizome-san!”

It was here that he seemed to prove enough of a nuisance to warrant some kind of hit; finally, like he was doing something. Unfortunately, she sure packed.... quite a punch. Damn ghosts. He made sure to send a little hand signal Nanami's way --  _keep on._

"And I get my entry fee too," she pressed on. Usami kept raining down attacks. "It's not that I didn't want to reach out -- I was too afraid of what would happen if I didn't. What's most important to me is where I am!"

Yukizome shone ever brighter. Hinata kept firing off bullets.

“So if you say we have to do it, we will,” Nanami said. She stumbled only to settle up against, forehead-to-forehead with Yukizome, visibly shaking from the effort to keep her psychs up while carrying on conversation. “To overcome the despair of betrayal... of having to fight. To not give up hope!”

Which, hey, seemed as good a time as any for Hinata’s reload to finish up. He aimed as quickly as he could, equally wary of hitting Nanami and of losing the opportunity of Yukizome's turned back, and–-

…and everything exploded into light.

* * *

 

 Day six comes and goes. Still no word from the Game Master.

“I’m a little disappointed,” Komaeda says. “I would have thought that the Game Master would come up with something truly despairing to better stoke the hope of the winners…”

“…Yeah,” Hinata says absently. He’s looking up at the skyline, tracing the skeleton of skyscrapers with his eyes. Just one more day, right? And all this is… over

In and out like a light. Right.

He looks down at his hand, timer zipping zeroes back at him. Same as all week.

Dread settles in a powder on his ribs. After the two weeks he’s had, it feels more tongue-in-cheek than anything; if this ends on such a quiet note, he’ll eat his foot.

“Hey… Komaeda,” he says suddenly. It’s more on impulse on anything, and one that he doesn’t entirely understand at that, bolstered by the radio static in his own head of late, but… “What are you gonna do when we get out of here?”

Surprise unfurls soft over Komaeda’s features. “The confidence of the talented is truly admirable, aha, even with such a hex as me on your side – oh, we’ll be finding out your talent soon enough, you know, how exciting–”

“Komaeda,” he cuts in, more amused than he’d entirely like. “You’re rambling. I didn’t mean anything by it, just… curious.”

“Curious,” Komaeda repeats. “About me.”

Hinata coughs. When he puts it like that, it’s – well. Gee. “I was just wondering. You don’t have to deflect all the time, you know.”

It takes him a moment of silence, watching the banshee sun as it hovers over 104. “I supose it depends,” he says, slowly. Like he’s choosing his words terribly carefully; like he’s not used to being asked such mundane questions about himself, about his life. “On how things go. But on the off-chance things don’t go devastatingly, and things turn out alright, then… Maybe…”

He trails off into a fretted brow and drawn mouth, and Hinata gets the impression that this level of casual conversation is a little much for now. He brushes it off. “Hey, look, don’t worry about it, yeah? Just– me and Nanami were gonna meet up after the game, right here at Hachiko. I was wondering if you wanted to meet up too...?”

Komaeda blinks at him, teacup-eyed at the very suggestion. “Hinata-kun is very kind, that his feelings of social obligation extend even to a non-person like me, but you shouldn’t feel pressured to show civility to–”

“Will you cut that out?” He sighs, but there’s no bite to it. In the following befuddled silence that usually follows him asking Komaeda not to compare himself to any number of objects or affronts to humanity, he reaches over and flicks him, lightly, square on the forehead. Komaeda’s eyes cross up-and-in comically in disbelief. “I’m not the kind of person to ask out of obligation. I never have to see you again, you know – I’m asking because I  _want_ to.”

Amazing, how much easier it becomes to express feelings and shit when it’s to prove Komaeda wrong.

They make a few more rounds of self-deprecation and counterpoint until finally he manages to fluster Komaeda into a momentary armistice with is own self-loathing, palms flat against the ledge and lashes brushing the swell of his cheek as he looks away. It might be a delirious half-dream, but still he thinks he hears Komaeda murmur something along the lines of, “Yes;” and then, more certain, “Yes, I think I’d like that. Thank you, Hinata-kun.”

For a moment, it’s easy to forget. Sitting there against the sun-warmed ledge, watching the sky with a boy and making weekend plans and waiting for sleep, it’s almost easy to forget where they are – drowning in a sea of ghosts, nooses wrapped around their throats that tighten with every passing day. He wonders what it would be like to meet Komaeda or Nanami or Kuzuryuu without all this, this threat of permanent death looming overhead, this constant reminder that he doesn’t even fully remember who he  _is_  clawing at his throat. The smile drips away from the corners of his mouth.

“That Composer bastard,” he says, gruffly. At this Komaeda looks surprised, and oh, yeah, he guesses he wouldn’t know. “The one who runs the game. I don’t know who they are, but – they’ve gotta be pretty fucking sick to make me… to make us do all this.”

He must have misspoken somehow, because Komaeda just stares at him, that same dark and nearly forlorn surprise on his face. His fault for spewing jargon; no good from hanging out with the dead so long indeed. Eventually, Komaeda says, “Yes,” into the silence, and smooths a strand of hair away from his face. “Yes, you’re certainly right about that.”

But the tension dissipates as soon as it comes, shaken out like the rain, and Komaeda reaches over and hooks their arms, same as before. “Have hope!” he admonishes, cheerful despite it all. Echoes upon echoes. “Right, Hinata-kun?”

Still, he knows how to play his part. “Hope,” he says. This time he can’t help the twitch in his hand, the way it twines over Komaeda’s own. Komaeda lights up in surprise, rigid and just a little flushed, from this angle, but he settles back against Hinata on an exhale. “Right.” 

* * *

 

Something went wrong.

“We won,” Hinata says, voice hoarse. “I don’t understand – we  _won,_ we’re supposed to–”

A boy with a mop of shoulder-length hair who couldn’t be much older than him. Bruises under his eyes, hands wrung into roses. Hinata wondered if he was like that when he died. “I-I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I didn’t– there’s only so much for us to do–”

“Who’s  _we_.” As far as he could see, there was only himself – just him and this guy in a sea of concrete glow. No reapers, no game master, no Nanami. “Who are  _you._ ”

“The Conductor!” he said. Nearly yelped, like he was glad to have something to say with confidence. “M-Mitarai, the Conductor. Second in command to the Composer, I oversee the game…”

Great. More bullshit jargon. Just what he needed. “Look, I don’t  _care_ what you – I just… want to see my partner. Please.”

If possible, Mitarai went even paler, lily-white against the street. Hinata could imagine, almost, Nanami’s wavering outline, glitching in and out of dead-and-alive. Oh boy.

And so Hinata became the first person – ever, so he’s told – to play a second Reaper’s Game.

* * *

 

Something goes wrong.

“Mitarai,” he says. He’s more prepared this time, steadier on his feet, but if anything it seems Mitarai has lost that same measure of confidence; the bruises under his eyes are bluer than ever, his frame even more gaunt and sickly than before. “What the hell is going on.”

It doesn’t seem possible for anything Hinata says to even reach him, really; he’s too wrapped up in himself, muttering frantic reposes that Hinata can’t entirely piece together. Anxiety wraps around him like a cocoon, swathes upon swathes into a thick shell Hinata can’t hope to break through, but–

But Hinata’s lost one, maybe two friends, and Nanami’s still out there in limbo, and he doesn’t even know where Komaeda  _is,_ so Mitarai’s gonna suck it up. “ _Mitarai_ ,” he barks. “Where’s Komaeda. We didn’t even get to the seventh day – did we win because the Game Master never–?”

“Seventh day?” Mitarai startles, at last to attention. “H-Hinata-san, you certainly did make it to the seventh day, albeit only for a moment. That’s… where Komaeda-san…”

Hinata stares at him.

“Where Komaeda-san…!”

It starts in his hands – that feeling of being held underwater, of being submerged in a cold lake for so long you start to lose track of whether or not your limbs are your own. “Mitarai,” he says, with a nearly eerie calm. “What happened to Komaeda.”

The Conductor reacts as if struck, arms up above his face, and Jesus, if this were another time, another place, because this kid clearly needs some fucking help. “Sh-she was a rogue agent!!” he cries. “I don’t know how… something like that got into the Game… but Komaeda-san! He protected you, a-and…”

That cold and trickling feeling hits his lungs. Typical. “Komaeda.”

“Y-you were this week’s only survivor,” he says, meekly. “He must have had some care for you as a partner. But because you finished without your partner, this session is t-technically void…”

“So you’re telling me.” His voice is vacant and far-away in his own ears. “That the last game couldn’t qualify because I won  _with_ my partner, but wouldn’t leave her for dead. And this game can’t qualify because – because my partner’s already fucking– So what, I can only make it through if I actively choose to leave my partner behind?” He laughs. It hurts his throat. “No – no, no, I give up. I can’t do that, are – are you kidding?”

“Hinata-san, please don’t despair!” Mitarai moves to grasp his hands, something undeniably earnest about the gesture, but he flinches back from himself before he can. “There can only be a maximum of three games at once – if you make it through again, there’s no choice but to let you th-through! And Nanami-san too!”

He’s so tired. He’s so, so tired, and seasick on his own existence – standing here with Komaeda and Natsumi gone and Nanami in limbo and Kuzuryuu God-knows-fucking-where. The heel of his hand crushes up between his eyes harshly. One time was a trial, but two, well, what's the point?

“J-just one more week,” Mitarai pleads. It sounds like it might be more to himself than to Hinata. “Just one, just – just seven more days–”

Hinata wobbles, just a little.

And so Hinata becomes the first person – ever, so he’s told – to play a third Reaper’s Game. 

* * *

 

A note on Reaper’s Games: there is always an entry fee.

“Are you fucking serious,” Hinata says flatly. In contrast to whoever last week’s Game Master had been – if they’d even fucking existed – this week’s appears right off the bat, sharp and tall in a three-piece suit like he’s heading off stock trades rather than teenage death games. Munakata, he calls himself.

“Munakata, he calls himself” clicks his cell phone shut and files it away into his pocket, standing tall at attention once again. “More than serious,” he says. All the other reapers and Game Masters have looked relatively young, somewhere between Hinata’s age to fresh-out-of-university, and he supposes he can see it here too, if he looks hard enough, but he has an air like a seasoned veteran. Whatever that means in a place like this, he isn't sure he wants to know. “I promised the Conductor an utter shut-down within the first day. Such would allow him to further his goals in the name of hope.”

“Fucking  _Mitarai_?” He just doesn’t get it, apparently. That’s fine. He doesn’t need to get undead politics, he just needs to get a  _partner,_ which he can’t do if his entry fee is–- “Every fucking player in the game seems a little excessive, don’t you think?”

Munakata arches a brow. “Playing the Reaper’s Game three times is excess unto itself, wouldn’t you think? But no matter – we simply had to get a little creative.”

“Creative, right. It’s a real ace in the hole to make sure your opponent can’t even fucking play–” He pauses, mind spinning. “I– know someone who played without a partner. I think. Can I–?”

Munakata’s eyes flash something unfamiliar, something unnameable but not entirely unpleasant. Still, when he speaks his voice is as icy as ever. “You know someone who  _survived_ without a partner,” he corrects flatly. “Such an option is not permissible to players who wish to remain in the game – and generally not permissible to  _anyone,_ but Yukizome is something of a rule-breaker when players get involved.”

And that’s – confirmation that Kuzuryuu is still alive, at least, but in the same swoop confirmation that Hinata won’t be for long. God fucking dammit. Was that – the goal all along? Mitarai’s goal all along, to get his hopes up, to get him to  _dare_ to hope he could survive this stupid, ridiculous,  _rigged_ fucking game just so he could-–

“What’s got you looking so ugly?”

It takes him a moment, entrenched as he is in his own distress, to realize that the taunt is directed at him. And it should feel like salt in the wound, a kick while he’s down at his lowest, but it doesn’t, it  _can’t_ , because–-

Munakata’s fingers settle into a pinch over the bridge of his nose. “I should have known,” he says, without much bite, “that anything she meddled with would come back to cause trouble in the end.”

Kuzuryuu stands looming overhead, a pair of black wings throwing shadows tall and spiny out from his shoulders.

The pact forms immediately.

* * *

 

Hinata finds himself waking to the second day before they can talk much.

Nearby, Kuzuryuu slouches, curved skeleton-like into himself; ghosts well up beneath his eyes, in the hollow of his throat. He twines the tails of Natsumi’s school uniform ribbon around his fingers delicately, like it’ll fray or maybe disintegrate completely with too much contact. A little plush settles on his shoulder.

He coughs the sleep from his throat. “So,” he says. Kuzuryuu fidgets, folds the ribbons into his closed fist like something precious. “Reaper, huh?”

Kuzuryuu snorts. “Not for long, I figure. They’ll take my wings before too much time passes, now that I’m back to being a player.”

“Shame,” he says, tonelessly. “Jobs. Economy.”

He gets a punch to the shoulder for his effort. “You look like shit, man. You gonna make it through another week of this?”

“No choice, huh.” He splashes a little in the fountain, just enough to wipe his face. He wonders if this – the sensation, the feeling, any of it – is real at all. He closes his eyes. “…My partner died, last week. I don’t even remember.”

This seems to sober him, if nothing else. He strokes the ribbon almost absently, little half-moons with his thumb. “I saw,” he says. “He a friend?”

“I don’t really know?” He laughs a little. Runs a hand through his hair. “Could’ve been. Thought we would be, after.”  _But now there’s no after. And I thought about kissing him once and it made me feel like my body was on fire but then he went and got himself killed for me and I don’t even remember it. And yeah, now there’s no after._

Kuzuryuu claps him on the arm. Hinata thinks he might offer some kind of condolence, and he’s grateful, he is, but all of a sudden he’s thinking about that ramen shop, about that string of tapioca pearls and the domino effect that sent one spilling into his cup. Was this it? Was this what happened when it all ended? That miraculous thing that Komaeda had been hoping for – this couldn’t possibly be it, a lifetime of strife and hardship culminating into one shitty teenager clawing and kicking and screaming to live just one week longer.

The air is heavy with the lack of incessant chatter or the constant proximity. His chest goes tight.

“Hey,” Kuzuryuu says, shaking him steady. “I know how you feel, but you gotta keep it together, man. Everything’s riding on this, right?”

He – exhales, tries to pull himself back down to earth. Manages a nod, though it feels a little bobble-headed. “Yeah,” he says. “Wouldn’t want you or your new plushie to go home empty-handed, right?”

Kuzuryuu snorts. “We’ll get to that.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He flops back as gently as he can, rests his head on the fountain’s edge. “If nothing else, the Game Master this time around seems pretty straight-laced. Let’s just – for once, try to have a normal week.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Kuzuryuu says, sitting down beside him. “Agreed.” 

* * *

 

Predictably, this lasts approximately three days before being blown all to hell.

In Hinata’s defense, this time it’s most definitely not their fault – no partners trying to play mind games with the other players, no one going rogue and joining the other team out of grief, nothing like that. The first four days actually go perfectly smoothly; Munakata is a strict Game Master, and after that stunt on the first day he doesn’t try anything besides some fairly rigorous missions. Even the reapers seem, at first, to be pretty much tuckered out after two weeks of constantly working graveyard shift (har har), because they don’t give them much trouble at all. Besides Koizumi’s stringent errand-sends to let walls down, of course.

But then the reapers start to get. Weird.

“Hey, uh,” he says. They’ve pulled out of their third consecutive Monokuma battle and there’s not a reaper in sight; normally one would’ve popped up to give them a hard time by now. “Do things seem a little… quiet? To you?”

Kuzuryuu grunts, cuffs him good-naturedly. “Don’t talk like such hot shit – we barely got out of that battle alive, you know.”

Which, well. Not  _exactly_ true – three games in a row have got him  _some_ kind of experience, after all – but far be it from his to deny Kuzuryuu’s flair for the dramatic when he’s the only thing keeping him from a shallow grave. “No, I mean.” He gestures vaguely. “Reapers. None are around.”

Kuzuryuu shrugs him off. “Eh, never too much of a good thing, you know? I wouldn’t worry too much about it. If they wanna fuck off for a bit, I say let em.”

He could argue with that; could remind Kuzuryuu that Komaeda is dead and Nanami is still out there, floating unaware in some hyperdeath ether, and Hinata’s been through this ringer twice already and is starting to go threadbare around the edges. But Kuzuryuu has two useless wings folded up against his back like an apology, a keen eye and a schoolgirl ribbon threaded between his fingers, and he just doesn’t have the heart like he might have two weeks ago. He’s just one guy, but he’s not – the only one. He’s not the only one who can’t seem to get his feet back under him.

And so Hinata, however reluctantly, lets them fuck off for a bit.

…but then they run into–-

"Mioda?” He slows to a stop, puts a hand to Kuzuryuu’s chest til he does the same. “Uh. What’s… up?”

She doesn’t look up from where she’s leaned against the venue wall. Instead she opts to gaze down at her shoes, hair falling in a tabby cat curtain of black and neon around her face.

…Huh.

“Mioda?” he repeats. There’s an air of caution seeping into his step when he goes to move closer, one that he can’t really explain away. Mioda can more than hold her own in a fight, but…

Kuzuryuu curls in on himself a bit, less a dog scared off a scent and more a wolf sizing up a potential fight. “Maybe we should leave her alone,” he says warily. “Could be one of those weird artist things, you know? And I mean, she  _is_ a reaper…”

Hinata hums, files the suggestion away for just a second. Instead he steps forward, waves a hand a little in front of Mioda’s face. Cartoony – or it would be, if she responded. As-is, she just… stands. Definitely living – or what passes for it here, at least – but vacant as an empty house, lights on or no.

“Mioda…?”

“Just forget it, man.” Kuzuryuu huffs, striding on past him. Even so, Hinata can feel the gravity of his kept proximity, carefully kept. “She’s not listening to you.”

“I guess.” The resignation eats unhappily at him, settling somewhere awkward and heavy in his gut; he waits another few seconds for something, anything, some kind of sign that says she’s okay, but nothing’s forthcoming. “Just. Uh. Shit, Mioda, get me if you need me?” It’s going in one ear and out the other, he’s sure, but he’s dragged the moment on long enough.

“Hajime-chan.”

He turns back eagerly at the sound of Mioda’s voice, but there’s something – undeniably off about it, a serene and opiated monotone. She doesn’t look up. “Mioda?”

“Nagito-chan told Ibuki not to tell, but... Ibuki watched this really great anime. Have you heard about it?” 

* * *

 

“That was fucking weird.”

They’re back on the ledge by the fountain – back where they all ate shaved ice together, back where Natsumi got hit by a Monokuma trap and left nothing but a uniform accessory behind. Hinata had hesitated when he first caught sight of it, steps slowing to a water-logged pace, but Kuzuryuu had walked past looking pretty damn non-plussed, so he guesses it’s… fine, or something like it. They might be fire-forged at this point, but it’s not like Hinata knows Kuzuryuu well enough to start dictating how he manages his own trauma.

Mioda's voice wrapped around Komaeda's name echoes bell-like in his ears.

He chooses to pour his efforts into scanning the crowds instead. It's... probably nothing, right? “You said it,” he agrees, more uneasy than annoyed. Mioda's always been bubbling over with weird shit, right? It's not like Komaeda's. Well.

They. Probably? Had time to talk alone last week?

“I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty sick of this shit.” He slouches back, pulling the ribbon out of his pocket in favor of fiddling with it in plain sight. “Don’t think I can handle much more of this.”

“What choice do we have?” He frowns; the crowds look thinner, today, more stagnant. “It’s not like any of us wanted to be here the first two times. Or, uh…”

Kuzuryuu snorts. “It’s fine. I’d say  _as long as we win,_ but you won before, right? And they still wouldn’t let you through.”

“Apparently third time’s the charm, so…” He rubs his neck. It sounds thin, even to him, but what again, choice does he have? What choice has he had, in any of this? Some useless kid who can’t even remember his own talent. “Conductor said this is the last time we’re allowed to go through.”

“Yeah, ‘cause they’ve been real fuckin' astute so far.” He pauses, and when he speaks again he’s lost his bite, softened into something reflective and for himself. “I just… gotta get out of here.”

 _Gotta get out of here._  He wonders if Nanami or Komaeda ever thought the same; if it’s why Nanami was able to fight Yukizome, or Komaeda sent those other guys away (what happened to them?). But if so, why…

He shakes his head, curls in a little on himself. “Hey,” he says, trying for conversational, “you never told me the deal with that thing on your shoulder.”

A grimace. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Dude.” He gestures around vaguely – to the city at large, the people who wade through them like mist. “Seriously?”

It fades as quickly as it came, slides into a grin all knowing and sharp. “Shit, can’t fault you there, huh? Fine, fine, but no calling me crazy, alright? Not after the month I’ve had.” He sits up, tugs the plush off his shoulder and onto the ledge. It moves a little, with that same weird alive-unalive quality that all the Monokumas have, or Nanami’s plush when it was psych’d, but it doesn’t really have any kind of recognizable shape – just a bundle of fuzz with a miniature Reaper’s Game emblem on it. “This is, uh. Natsumi. What’s left of her, at least.”

Hinata exhales through his nose.

“Okay,” he says.

Kuzuryuu groans, plopping the plush back up onto his shoulder. “What did I fuckin’ say!”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“But you were clearly thinking it, dickhead!” Still, the scrunch smooths out of his face on its own, making way for just… tired, instead. “I know it’s ridiculous. For all I know it’s not even real, y’know? But that Yukizome chick, she… saved my ass, when she really didn’t have to. Figure I owe it to her to give her the benefit of the doubt, huh?”

Yukizome. He figures she’s probably alright, if that was really part of the game’s structure, but remembering her still puts a lump in his throat that he can’t quite swallow down. How much could have possibly happened, he wonders, that he could’ve stopped thinking about that, for even a second?

“So if you win,” Hinata says. “Natsumi will...?”

“Honestly? No clue.” He laughs. Hinata thinks it’s sounded less genuine. “I got too keyed up, y’know? Couldn’t let you drown out here on your own. Figured if I became a reaper I could get close enough to the Composer to sort some shit out, but.”

“The Composer, huh?” He sits up proper. “I mean, if we find them, it would probably be easier to get some answers…”

And then Koizumi shoots Hinata in the head.

* * *

 

“What,” Hinata says, clambering across the scramble, “the  _fuck._ ”

It’s not that he ever really put it past Koizumi to shoot him or anything, but he figured he’d actually  _deserve_ it. At the very least, he assumed she’d get some sort of satisfaction out of it, but as-is she’s just standing there blankly, reaper-gun blowing imaginary smoke up and away into the afterlife. She doesn’t even seem particularly bothered by his escape, really; if anything, it looks like shooting him up sapped the last reserves of her energy.

“ _Hey_!” Kuzuryuu barks after him. “You break that broad’s heart or somethin?!”

Koizumi, with a man. Right. If he had the breath for it he’d laugh. Instead, he settles for wheezing out a “No,” as they scatter across the streets. He’d been right when he thought the crowds were thinner today, he realizes; plenty of people, living or dead, have drifted off to stand in that same serenely catatonic state Mioda had been in before. Goddammit.

Well, disaster does come in threes.

“Hey!” he shouts. Not that he’s really expecting it to work, but… Fatal or no, a shot to the head is enough to rattle anybody. He just needs  _something._ Another tapioca pearl in his cup to justify the impact. “Hey, Game Master! Munakata! You got a sec?”

He’s more surprised than anything when Munakata materializes, impeccable as ever with his manicured nails and tailored suit. When he does, time around them seems to slow – the way snow might fall the the bottom of a snow globe, but rather hanging suspended for however long he deigns to stay. If Yukizome had been a breath of life in the Game, Munakata is…

Well, a ghost. He bats a cat’s-eye at Hinata, annoyed. “You called?”

Which, yeah. Yeah, he did. “Yeah.” His voice trips over the stitch in his side. “Yeah, your reapers are going fucking crazy. What the hell? We’re doing your missions, we’re–”

“Are you done?” Munakata asks. It’s like being picked up by the scruff; still, there’s a minuscule crack in his brow that suggests this isn’t everything he planned. “I’m not sure what the reapers are up to, but it’s not business of mine – so long as they’re running the game, I see no reason to intervene.”

“No reason? Are you… are you kidding me?” He bends, just a little, arms crossed over his stomach. “This is pretty clearly unfair, y– you! You can take us to the Composer, right?”

Munakata arches a long, thin brow. “The Composer? That’s quite literally impossible, but I wouldn’t fret much – he’s due to make an appearance at the end of every game. And as for fairness…” He looks down his nose. “If you want to waste your time on such banality, be my guest. But you know as well as anyone what game you’re playing. I suggest you re-channel that effort into trying to survive.”

And he’s gone.

“Piece of shit,” Kuzuryuu mutters. Still, he claps Hinata on the shoulder. “But hey, did he say the Composer shows up at the end of every game? You meet him or somethin?”

Which… yeah, he sure did say that. His brow knits as the fallacy of it sinks in. “Nope, never. Just me and the Conductor.”  _And Nanami, once._

Contradiction upon contradiction. He catches himself on the lip of wanting to know what they mean and preferring to stomp them out.

“Typical.” Kuzuryuu sighs, cocks a look back out to the crowds. “What’s that mean for us, then?”

“It means,” he says. Gravity loses hold on his gaze, and it floats endlessly upward, past hundreds of windows glinting in the sun and up to the jumbotrons with deadlines emblazoned across them. 7 DAYS. “We’ve gotta win.”

* * *

 

They’re closing the curtain on their sixth mission for the week – legions of blissed-out reapers blessedly dodged – when Hinata looks up at the sun.

“You think I’ll really remember what my talent is?” he asks suddenly. It feels raw, somehow, a band-aid too freshly torn to touch.

Kuzuryuu doesn’t seem to share this sentiment. “What, you still don’t remember?” An elbow in his rib. “C’mon, man, none of that shit really matters here. You see me pulling out my mafia connections on Monokumas or whatever? You’re here, so you get another chance, that’s all that counts.”

“Yeah.” He pulls a knee to his chest, keeps looking up to the sky. Komaeda had been so earnest about it, and Nanami so certain of its irrelevance, but... But. He stirs beside himself. “Hey – do you remember how you died?”

This, if nothing else, catches him off-guard; he blinks down at him, surprise unfurling on his babydoll-face. “Huh? Yeah – me and Natsumi were in a plane crash together. Why do you ask?”

And it’s just too much – too many threads without origin or end, all tangled together with no rhyme or reason. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “No reason.” 

* * *

 

Day seven: fight the Game Master up in Pork City. Typical.

“Yo, Kuzuryuu,” he says. He thinks about Komaeda, about all the questions he never got to make sense of, how senseless the nature was of a death he can’t even remember, about Nanami floating in hyperspace and Natsumi reduced down to a doll.

“Huh?”

“I really…" But there's that feeling again. Figure out or stomp down. "...just. The Composer, you know?"

Kuzuryuu laughs. It cuts sharp and bright against the blue sky. “Man,” he says, “me too.” 

It’s sort of… anticlimactic.

It’s not that Munakata isn’t a bitch to fight, because goddamn. Hinata didn’t have any illusions in the first place about how much of a fight was packed in that designer suit, but if he had they would’ve been knocked into oblivion pretty damn quick. It’s just that–-

Their first game had felt like something. Natsumi died and it was fucking awful, but at the end of the week it felt like they had accomplished something, learned their after-school lesson and put their pens in their pots and were heading home for the day. The week after was a symphony with no one left to play it, a never-ending chaos of unanswered questions and ellipses that would continue on into eternity. This week just feels…

Empty.

He wonders, briefly, if he and Komaeda tracked down last week’s Game Master like this, if he had the same kind of reflective bullshit going on. If they fought well together. Grief and confusion sit low in his throat but high in his gut, a tide and a flood line all at once.

As he lands the finishing blow, he can see them down below – congregations, lots of them, the city-swept sprawl of a neon light reduced to a dim glow. A crawl. The crowds are very nearly still.

Munakata stops, and shatters, and Hinata thinks –  _there’s nothing hopeful about any of this_. 

* * *

 

It’s different this time. No lights, no empty streets, no weird mist.

No Mitarai.

Instead there are just coils of white like television static, like Yukizome had on her like a cloak, bright and blinding. And Kuzuryuu looks over at Hinata, like  _Can you believe this shit?_

And Hinata looks at Kuzuryuu, like  _Honestly, this might as well be happening._

And so they fight – two of them dumped together somewhere dark, as though underground, all recognizable features kicked away from the city and from the world. Out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he can see a little pink rabbit helping them on. Three of them, then, together, scraping by out here in limbo, kicking and grasping blindly to some shapeless happy end.

Maybe he’s ungrateful. He just can’t stop thinking back on the four and five – like a tongue poking into the holes of fallen teeth, knocked out by a doorknob-and-string or something less benign. Fresh wounds being denied their chance to heal with every jab. Maybe he’s ungrateful; maybe, but he just–-

For a moment, he thinks about what it would have been like, to have kissed Komaeda. To seized him by the shoulders and kissed him quiet, clacked their lips together in a mess of teeth and drool. He doubts it would have been perfect. Nothing with Komaeda ever seems to stay in just one place.

But he knows better than anyone that for a first to last, it doesn’t have to be good – it just has to mean something.

When things end here it doesn’t seem to mean much of anything; just another TO BE CONTINUED before they’re inevitably put through some other ringer, cosmologically chewed up and spat out onto the pavement without so much as a thanks for goddamn playing. He settles back into the underground or alleyway or whatever and it’s like the weight of every bone in him is hitting separately. The tapioca pearls, he thinks, scattering on and on in every direction, with no real reason for any of it, no real human contact.

Figure out or stomp down, right?

Truth be told, he’s getting a little tired.

There’s a resignation setting in as he touches back down, lights dimming out, and familiarity settles onto his shoulders like a blanket. When the light fully fades, Mitarai is at its source, on the floor looking more threadbare than ever.  _Mini-boss cleared,_ Hinata jokes bleakly.

He takes a deep breath.

“Hey,” he says, into the dark. Less because it makes sense, and more because nothing else could. He doesn't know what he's hoping for. “Komaeda.”

The dark falls like a star, like a light, and out walks Shibuya’s Composer. 

* * *

 

So there he is: stunning and cadaverous, wreathed by fallen light leaking in from cracks in the ground above. Fitting, Hinata thinks, though he’s too delirious to wholly piece together why.

“Hello, Hinata-kun,” Komaeda greets pleasantly, like he isn’t living dead. More living. More dead. “I have to say, figuring me out is far more than anyone could have expected of you. You have my appreciation, you know.”

Hinata just stares.

“Hmm?” He arches a brow. “Cat got your tongue? Well, I suppose that’s be expected – my dear Conductor told you I was dead, didn’t he?”

Mitarai looks up, hair falling away from his face like he's coming up from underwater. At the very least, he seems to be holding it together, albeit with Herculean effort; Hinata can see it plainly, how it digs its heels into the set of his mouth, the hunch of his shoulders. It’s hard to blame him.

“I lost,” Mitarai says plaintively. He closes his eyes. “My Composer.”

Kuzuryuu shifts his weight with a grunt. “I don’t really get what kind of game you two are playing,” he says, staggering up to Hinata’s side. “But you’re Hinata’s partner, right? Thought you ate it.”

“Oh, Kuzuryuu-kun.” Komaeda blinks in near-surprise. Near. “I almost forgot you were here – but don’t worry, there’s no need for you and Nanami-san to waste any more time here. Things will be wrapping up shortly.”

He snaps his fingers, and with barely a breath in between Kuzuryuu stills completely, wrought into an effigy with his little Natsu-plushie just as still on his shoulder. This, if nothing else, shakes Hinata out of his stupor – the mallet-to-kneecap reminder of what he has left to lose. He doesn’t know if seeing Nanami like this would feel worse than not seeing her at all, so he keeps his head straight and stiff on his neck.

“What did you do to them,” he says, short and shaky. “Komaeda.”

Komaeda has the nerve to look shocked he’s even asking. “They’re perfectly safe, Hinata-kun!” he says. “I mean, far be it from me to rob the lives of such clearly refined talents, and for no real purpose… There’s just no need for them to be here right now.”

“Far be it from you.” His laugh tastes small and bitter in his throat. “You can cut that shtick out now, _My Composer._ ” And he’d been stupid enough to feel sympathy. Got him good, huh.

“Ah, that isn’t exactly fair, is it?” He waves, laughs a little, all mild apologeticism. When he’s like this – like he was before, the way Hinata’s known him all along – it’s so hard not to settle back into relief, some sort of divorced bauble of _oh thank God, oh thank God you’re alive, do what you want I’m just glad you’re alive._ Forgetting and ignoring his partner – the person he spent a week with, the person he thought _died for him_ – because that person is never coming back, that’s…

Komaeda continues, effectively cutting through his thoughts. “I wasn’t misleading you, really. I may be the Composer, but everything I told you is true! About my luck cycle, about my past – oh! And of course I really am a miserable waste of life-force.”

Hinata just looks at him, fingers snarled in the fabric of his jeans. “Right. This whole – game, all of it. You never meant to mislead anyone.”

Disappointment falls in a shadow upon his face. It creeps dangerously close to that sneer he wore a lifetime ago, that snakebite-withdrawal. “Surely even you can feel it, Hinata-kun,” he says, voice dropping. “It’s nauseating. My whole city, infected to its centrum mundi. _Writhing_ with it.” His eyes have that feverish, spiraling look to them again, but Hinata barely notices, with the way he’s starting to shiver.

Hinata steps back without really thinking about it. “What… What are you– the mobs? Is that why the reapers are so–”

When Komaeda sighs, it carries a whole gust of wind behind it. There’s something dangerous here. “Is that really what you think? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised – this _is_ why I chose you, after all, Hinata-kun. But during our time together, I almost thought…”

“Chose me?” Chose. The connotation is bone-chilling, but Hinata can’t quite bring himself to the proper horror, not when he’s distracted by something else entirely.

_Even you._

_This is why._

“Komaeda,” he says. He wishes, in that sort of elementary way, that he could force more gravity into his voice; that he could make this moment and all its edges matter. But it’s in vain. He can feel it, now, like drowning, a slow ache for air, a slow horror unraveling and dawning all at once. Into his hands, into his throat. “What’s my talent?”

* * *

When they first met: owlishly, Komaeda had blinked at him, hands wreathed into roses, and asked,  _You don't remember who you are?_

At present: Komaeda shakes so hard he seems to become someone else altogether.

“You?” he says, eyes alight. “You? You? You? You? You? You? You? You?”

“Goddammit, Komaeda!” At a loss for anything to do with his hands, anything to throw or break or cling to, his body brings him forward instead, a tumultuous little lurch. He feels like things could get knocked loose of gravitational pull any second and start sliding, weightless, around his vision. Seasick on his own existence all over again. “Quit – _quit_ fucking around with me!”

He lets out a distressed little sound, high and breathy and bubbling out of his throat. It takes Hinata a moment to realize he’s laughing. “You,” he says, with more purpose this time. “You, my dear proxy, my deeply beloved Hinata-kun, were chosen to be like no other player in the Game.”

Holding his breath isn't a conscious decision, exactly. Just instinct, to hold it in his lungs, conserve it in a grotesque fermata like he might lose his right to breathe any moment. His head shakes from side to side, just a little, unchecked.

“Completely talentless,” Komaeda says, twirling a strand of hair on his finger. Has it really only been a week since Hinata first thought about that hair in twines under his hands? It feels like a lifetime ago.

His laugh is just this edge of hysterical. Hinata gets the feeling. Could give into it himself, he thinks, right here underground.

“Why,” he says instead. _Why are you telling me this. Why is it true._

“It wouldn’t do to have an un-level playing field, Hinata-kun!” he says. “I’m the Composer, Mitarai-kun is my Conductor. I couldn’t just play a game against him _myself._ And as for you… do you really think someone alight with hope could put a halt to a plan to restore the city? But you, you, you–” He tugs at his own hair a little. Hinata wonders, half-dazed, if someone who’s allegedly “won” is supposed to look so upset. “You should feel proud. I needed you! And you performed… splendidly.”

Some distant part of him – the same dazed part keeping track of anything at all, now – notes that, for all that gleeful malice, Komaeda’s eyes have only gotten hazier; he reprimands himself for noticing just as quickly. Like it matters. Like anything about the past weeks matters.

“And my entry fee?” he says, voice hoarse. “For the first week. You said it was probably my talent, or just my memories of it, but–”

“Oh, I didn’t bother taking one,” Komaeda says dismissively. It feels like being thrown away, somehow. “I already had to take your memories of your death – ah, my luck took care of _that_ particular part of getting you into the game, of course, before you can ask – which settled the requirement well enough. And besides, why bother going through the values of someone without any talent? You wouldn’t even qualify for the Game under usual circumstances. I may not look like it, but I _am_ busy, Hinata-kun.”

His mouth is dry. When he speaks, his voice sounds far away. “Busy. Messing around with me all week must have really cut into your schedule, huh.”

Something about that makes Komaeda falter, just a little, but Hinata can’t bring himself to pay much mind. That day in the ramen shop threads itself up in his mind, unbidden – how flustered he’d felt at the slightest show of disappointment, even when Komaeda was just Komaeda and he was just… When they were just. He says, “So all that talk about being sure my talent was– about– you knew? That whole time?”

Komaeda’s fingers fan over his mouth like a domino effect. “Ah, you found me out? How observant – that is, for someone with no talent.” He shakes his head. “You’re my proxy, after all – it would be useless if you gave way to despair completely. If you lost momentum, the whole plan would go to waste… that is, before.” A yawn. “I suppose you’re free to fall into despair like the rest of this wretched city, or… anything you wish. Once the closing act is over, it won’t make much of a difference one way or another, hmm?”

And there’s – something foreboding about that, about the threat of a closing act, the way Komaeda says _won’t make much of a difference_ when Hinata knows better than anyone what Komaeda does or doesn’t matter. But Hinata’s not listening.

Completely talentless.

Of course he is.

* * *

When he was a kid, he liked detective novels.

It’s not that anything about him is particularly relevant, or so he’s been told recently, but then maybe it is. He was the sort to always try to figure out the mystery before the end, usually with little graphite-notes scrawled hastily into the margins. He figured it out sometimes. Sometimes he didn’t.

Either way, though, he usually learned some things.

The funny thing about a childhood is that it stays with you. He thinks a lot about water or drowning due to some accident when he was six that he barely even remembers. He thinks about detective novels less but people more, and how they work, and why they do the things they do.

He thinks about Komaeda’s hesitation over his entry fee, over his luck and his own childhood – the ways that it’s stayed with him, the ways it never really took root in the first place. He could be afraid of flying. Hinata doesn’t think that was a lie.

Something isn’t right.

“So you played a game against Mitarai,” he says. He’s looking at the ground, a little to concentrate, and a little because looking at him – hurts. “Because there’s too much despair in the city. Using me as your plus-one. What… were the stakes? What did you win here? _How_ did you even…?”

A sigh. “You still haven’t figured that out? That’s a little disappointing. But I’ll tell you, since you’ve helped me out so much– we were all alive once, hm? And to get into the game, you have to have a certain talent. My dear Conductor has an especially potent one, though he’s shy to admit it – won’t you share, Mitarai-kun?”

In all the confusion, he’d almost forgotten Mitarai was here, still spilled across the floor. The question seems to break his heart. “I’m… an animator,” he says. “Or t-tried to be.”

Hinata’s head snaps up. “Mioda– that anime–”

“There’s my partner!” He clasps his hands together. “Awfully clever to make the players promote Mitarai’s newest little anime ad in the scramble, don’t you think? That was the week you spent with Nanami-san, I believe. I really am lucky to have such a phenomenal Conductor, haha!”

“Don’t say that.” It’s barely more than a whisper, but Hinata can still hear it, spoken into the crook of Mitarai’s knees. “I lost. I lost, and now…”

“You were playing against me, you know!” Komaeda admonishes, and it feels like a mercy nonetheless. “And you very nearly had me, near the end. But I got lucky! Thanks to Hinata-kun, I suppose.”

Hinata pinches his nose, more to steady himself than anything else. “So the anime was – a hope… brainwashing? Is that really okay? I don’t know if–”

“I didn’t have time!” It’s like Mitarai’s marionette strings have been fully un-snipped. He scrambles back sharply, all joints and wild eyes. “I didn’t! I had to get this done, or he was– or he was–!”

 _Or he was what?_ Hinata wants to demand – wants to shake him, and Komaeda too, demand a straight answer from anyone at all, but Komaeda interrupts, sighing into something soft and resigned. “I understand your concern, Mitarai-kun,” he says, voice low. “But you can’t plant anything in salted earth like this city. I thought, perhaps, that you would prove to be the great hope that overcame this despair but…” The spirals in his eyes clear into something much heavier, tied to reality by a noose. “That was the last chance. There can be no rebirth. The most we can do for the world and its hope is to burn it down.”

That catches Hinata by the throat. “Burn it down? What are you g–”

But no sooner than he’s started to ask than the gun appears in his hand – so different from the little toy he’s been touting the past three weeks. No, this one’s much more like Komaeda’s own, a sudden and terrifying weight in his hand: he can see, dimly, blocks of color thrown into its reflection. He wants to drop it. He doesn’t know that he trusts his hands.

His gaze creeps up the barrel to where Komaeda’s standing before him, eerie and beautiful and holding his own gun. Grief sits heavy in his eyes, but his voice stays light.

“Don’t feel too bad, Hinata-kun,” he says. “It’s not like any of that really matters now, and besides – we have one last game to play.”

Hinata’s voice shakes. “Go to hell.”

“Such admirable resolve!” It happens like a whipcrack, like a pin-strike – one second Komaeda’s looking at him serenely, and the next he’s doing… just the same, but down the length of his arm. The barrel points straight toward Hinata. Komaeda’s expression doesn’t change. “As it happens, you’ve got the right idea. A good old-fashioned duel – the winner gets to decide what happens to Shibuya. You _do_ know how the mantle of Composer changes hands, right?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Komaeda–”

“I’m not!” He gives a watery little laugh. “It’s only fitting that it should be so simple, don’t you think? Haven’t you been through enough?” Hinata can hear the unspoken bounce-back: _Haven’t I been through enough._ “So we’ll keep it simple: I count backwards from ten, and on zero we shoot. Winner is Composer.”

“You can’t…” He clutches his side. It feels like he’s been running for so long. “Komaeda–”

And Komaeda says, “Ten.”

* * *

Ten seconds is a long time.

Hinata does aim. His hands shake like a bitch, but he does it – he aims and he stares and he shakes, eyes burning in their sockets. He thinks about his bed at home and how long it’s been since he slept there. He thinks about his parents, and his friends, and–-

(Something's wrong.)

But he also thinks about Nanami, and how she fought Yukizome with that steel on her face. Kuzuryuu’s reaper wings, folded against his back; the ribbon threaded through his fingers. Mitarai with his trembling fingers wrapped around a stylus.

Komaeda, small and afraid, stuck in his airplane seatbelt while he watched his life fall away in front of him; Hinata, shoving food into his partner’s hand and wishing desperately to understand someone he’d wanted to get as far away from just hours before.

Tapioca pearls, lots of them. Something miraculous.

“One–”

Hinata takes a deep breath, and drowns.

* * *

 

The thing about drowning – if you come back up, it’s a baptism.

 

* * *

“You should stop waiting for me.”

Shibuya is as loud as ever, as crowded as ever. Still, the voice cuts clear through the mess of it, something like sea glass from the direction of Hachiko. _Loyal after all._

“I won’t,” he says easily. He doesn’t worry about anyone overhearing him. The city has been bright, thriving lately. Things have a way of working out like that.

He can picture Komaeda – somewhere across the city, or maybe beneath it, leaning into a patch of shade. His hair in his face. Wearing something like a school uniform. He wonders when the last time it was Komaeda even went to school, and resolves to ask.

That same hum. “Seems like Hinata-kun is wasting an awful lot of time on someone who killed him,” he says. Then, as an addendum: “…twice.”

“Yeah, well.” He can feel the sly curve of a smile creeping up his face. He plops down by Hachiko. “It didn’t stick.”

“…Yes.” There’s something thoughtful about that. “I suppose not.”

Hinata closes his eyes, opens them again to a city skyline filled with hope and despair, jumbotrons that blaze with advertisements for soda and junk food instead of signatures on last wills and testaments. He breathes, and it takes. “You took care of it, right?” he says. It’s not the first time they’ve talked like this, but it’s nice to have the affirmation. For both of them, he thinks. “Otherwise, Shibuya would be gone… and me with it. But instead...”

“I stayed my decision. Other than that, I just set back the damage our Game enacted.” He doesn't volunteer any information about that great and ultimate hope he mentioned underground, what it was or what it could be. Hinata doesn't ask.

He says it dismissively enough, but it _feels_ different – more vibrant and alive, every second spun out in neon and starbursts. Like the city has a heart and it’s been renewed. Maybe it’s just Hinata that’s different. (Maybe it’s both.)

“I don’t forgive you,” Hinata says. He nudges a nearby pebble with his foot. “Not yet. But I have hope for you. And we’re meeting up here – all of us, Natsumi too. So you should come. You should come. I’ll keep waiting.”

There’s a stretch of radio silence – one that lingers long enough that Hinata starts to wonder if Komaeda’s stopped listening, or at least stopped replying. Not like it would be the first time. Still, he hears it eventually: a small, put-upon little sigh, which if Hinata didn’t know any better (and if being dead has taught him anything, it’s that he _doesn’t_ ) he’d call _embarrassed._

“I suppose if Hinata-kun keeps insisting,” he says, almost muffled, “despite my dropping many, _many_ hints that it’s a bad idea – it would be impudent of someone like me to say no.”

Hinata’s heart knots in his throat, and he smiles brightly at the sky.

“I’ll see you there,” he says.

He’s going to get that kiss if it kills him.

…Again.


End file.
